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THE SPIRIT OF 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 



THE 

SPIRIT OF AMERICAN 

LITERATURE 



BY 

JOHN MACY 




Garden City New York 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1913 






Copyright, 1908, 
The Atlantic Monthly 

Copyright, 1911, 
DoDD, Mead & Company 

Copyright, 1913, by 
Doubled AY, Page & Co. 

All rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages, 

including the Scandinavian 



■©CI.A343230 



PREFACE 

In this book something is said about most, if not quite all, 
of the emergent figures in American literature; an attempt is 
made to survey the four corners of the national library and 
to give an impression of its shape and size. It is hoped that 
the attempt may have resulted in a fairly adequate review or 
introduction for the student, and that it may be not uninter- 
esting to those who, students or not, like to listen to talk 
about books. If its purpose is approximately realized, 
this volume will be found to be a httle nearer to a col- 
lection of appreciative essays than to a formal history 
or bibliographic manual, and to be at the same time in- 
clusive to a degree that the genuine essayist would instinc- 
tively avoid. 

The true essayist is a privileged person. He may write 
fifty pages about Hawthorne and not write about Longfellow 
at all; he wilfully elects whom he will discuss. Such liberty 
is here subdued to the general consensus of opinion as to what 
men of letters are important. Some privilege, however, is 
assumed. Individual preference, rather than the impersonal 
judgment of critical Authority, accounts for the fact that 
Bryant, Mrs. Stowe, and Bret Harte are not signalized by 
separate chapters, whereas there are chapters on William 
James and Mr. Henry James. If this be a disproportion, it 

V 



PREFACE 

may help to restore harmony in the universe by balancing a 
disproportion on the other side which I find in some hand- 
books and histories. 

The historian is subservient to an ideal of encyclopedic 
completeness and to traditional values. He rules literature 
off in sections; into each school and period he puts the great 
men, and then stuffs the chinks with such as N. P. Willis 
and Margaret Fuller, who may have been admirable persons 
but omitted to make Uterature. Life is short, and art, even 
American art, is long and vital. It is perplexing to find in 
current manuals no mention of Father Tabb, but a full page 
about Anne Bradstreet; a chapter on Bryant, but only a 
page about Sidney Lanier; extended accounts of Charles 
Brockden Brown and William Gihnore Simms, but only half 
a page about Mark Twain. To be sure, the historian 
avowedly and properly puts emphasis on writers who are 
dead in the flesh, and finishes off his contemporaries briefly 
because they are not yet established and are too numerous 
to mention. But it seems weU, in books about hterature, 
not to discuss writers admittedly dead in the spirit, whose 
names persist by the inertia of reputation. 

No man's sense of what is important will agree exactly 
with his neighbour's judgment; moreover, it is risky for 
one who is making a book to hint defects in other works on 
the same subject. All that I wish to plead is that a living 
lion is better than a dead mouse. If we should have another 
chapter about a poet, it should treat not Bayard Taylor, nor 
Bryant, but James Whitcomb Riley or Father Tabb. That 
any one should question a chapter about William James in 

vi 



PREFACE 

a book in which a chapter on that dreadful bore, Jonathan 
Edwards, would pass unchallenged, seems to be a perversion 
of hterary values. If we should have a chapter on Bret 
Harte (as well we might), then we should have chapters 
about two very much better story-tellers — Sarah Orne 
Jewett and Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman. There is, I am 
confident, only one first-rate man of letters of the elder days 
who is not discussed in the following pages — Francis Park- 
man. The omission is due not to lack of admiration for his 
thrilling and finely written books, but to my inability to 
enter the field of purely historical work with any sure- 
ness or illusion of authority. 

If, as I believe, accepted handbooks and histories of Ameri- 
can literature pay too much attention to doubly dead 
worthies, whose books are not interesting, and miss or but 
timidly acknowledge contemporary excellence, there is a way 
of accounting for it. Every generation, except the more 
independent spirits in it, looks with too Chinese reverence 
upon its ancestors. Moreover, the passing generation of 
American writers, critics and professors, the men who wrote 
the prevalent handbooks, are intellectually a poor generation 
as compared with their fathers. They have reason to lack 
confidence in their contemporaries. The other day they drew 
up a list of their Uving selves. The National Institute of 
Arts and Letters announced the Forty American Immortals, 
the first roster of an absurd Yankee imitation of the French 
Academy. Twenty-eight men, "chosen from among the 
greatest living American writers" (that is, of course, men 
past middle age), were elected to immortality on the score 

vii 



PREFACE 

of literary achievement. On the roll are exactly three men 
who have made literature — Mr. Henry James, Mr. Howells, 
and Mr. James Whitcomb Riley. The list is well chosen; 
there is no other genius that one would nominate for a place 
in it, except Mrs. Wharton and Mrs. Freeman, who cannot 
be admitted because they are women. The list (except for 
two or three distinguished men who are dead) represents 
American literature for the last thirty or forty years. 
M oritur OS salutamus! 

Wrentham, April 26, 1912. J. M. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 











PAGE 


Preface ........ v 


Chapter 


I. General Characteristics .... 3 


II. Irving .... 




. 18 


III. Cooper 






. 35 


IV. Emerson 








. 45 


V. Hawthorne 








. 77 


VI. Longfellow 








. 97 


VII. Whittier . 








. Ill 


VIIL Poe 








. 123 


IX. Holmes 








. 155 


X. Thoreau 








. 171 


XL Lowell 








. 189 


XII. Whitman 








. 210 


- XIII. Mark Twain 








. 248^ 


XIV. Howells 








. 278 


XV. William James 








. 296 


XVI. Lanier 








. 309 


XVII. Henry James 








. 324-; 


Index 








. 341 



THE SPIRIT OF 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 



CHAPTER I 
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

American literature is a branch of English literature, 
as truly as are English books written in Scotland or South 
Africa. Our literature lies almost entirely in the nineteenth 
century when the ideas and books of the western world were 
freely interchanged among the nations and became accessible 
to an increasing number of readers. In literature nationality 
is determined by language rather than by blood or geography. 
M. Maeterlinck, born a subject of King Leopold, belongs to 
French literature. Mr. Joseph Conrad, born in Poland, is 
already an English classic. Geography, much less important 
in the nineteenth century than before, was never, among 
modern European nations, so important as we sometimes 
are asked to beUeve. Of the ancestors of English literature 
"Beowulf" is scarcely more significant, and rather less grace- 
ful, than our tree-inhabiting forebears with prehensile toes; 
the true progenitors of English literature are Greek, Latin, 
Hebrew, Italian, and French. 

American literature and English literature of the nine- 
teenth century are parallel derivatives from preceding cen- 
turies of English literature. Literature is a succession of 
books from books. Artistic expression springs from life 
ultimately but not immediately. It may be likened to a 

3 



4 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

river which is swollen throughout its course by new tribu- 
taries and by the seepages of its banks; it reflects the life 
through which it flows, taking colour from the shores; the 
shores modify it, but its power and volume descend from 
distant headwaters and affluents far up stream. Or it may 
be likened to the race-life which our food nourishes or im- 
poverishes, which our individual circumstances foster or 
damage, but which flows on through us, strangely impersonal 
and beyond our power to kill or create. 

It is well for a writer to say: "Away with books! I will 
draw my inspiration from life!" For we have too many 
books that are simply better books diluted by John Smith. 
At the same time, literature is not born spontaneously out 
of life. Every book has its Hterary parentage, and students 
find it so easy to trace genealogies that much criticism reads 
like an Old Testament chapter of "begats." Every novel 
was suckled at the breasts of older novels, and great mothers 
are often prolific of anaemic offspring. The stock falls off and 
revives, goes a- wandering, and returns like a prodigal. The 
family records get blurred. But of the main fact of descent 
there is no doubt. 

American hterature is EngUsh literature made in this 
country. Its nineteenth-century characteristics are evident 
and can be analyzed and discussed with some degree of 
certainty. Its "American" characteristics — no critic that 
I know has ever given a good account of them. You can 
define certain peculiarities of American politics, American 
agriculture, American public schools, even American religion. 
But what is uniquely American in American literature? Poe 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 5 

is Just as American as Mark Twain; Lanier is just as American 
as Whittier, The American spirit in literature is a myth, 
like American valour in war, which is precisely like the valour 
of Italians and Japanese. The American, deluded by a 
falsely idealized image which he calls America, can say that 
the purity of Longfellow represents the purity of American 
home life. An Irish Englishman, Mr. Bernard Shaw, with 
another falsely idealized image of America, surprised that a 
fact does not fit his image, can ask: "What is Poe doing in 
that galley.'*" There is no answer. You never can tell. 
Poe could not help it. He was born in Boston, and lived in 
Richmond, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia. Professor 
Van Dyke says that Poe was a maker of "decidedly un- 
American cameos," but I do not understand what that means. 
Facts are uncomfortable consorts of prejudices and emotional 
generalities; they spoil domestic peace, and when there is a 
separation they sit solid at home while the other party goes. 
Irving, a shy, sensitive gentleman, who wrote with fastidious 
care, said: "It has been a matter of marvel, to European 
readers, that a man from the wilds of America should express 
himself in tolerable English." It is a matter of marvel, just 
as it is a marvel that Blake and Keats flowered in the brutal 
city of London a hundred years ago. 

The Hterary mind is strengthened and nurtured, is in- 
fluenced and mastered, by the accumulated riches of litera- 
ture. In the last century the strongest thinkers in our 
language were Englishmen, and not only the traditional but 
the contemporary influences on our thinkers and artists were 
British. This may account for one negative characteristic 



6 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

of American literature — its lack of American quality. True, 
our records must reflect our life. Our poets, enamoured of 
nightingales and Persian gardens, have not altogether forgotten 
the mocking-bird and the woods of Maine. Fiction, written 
by inhabitants of New York, Ohio, and Massachusetts, does 
tell us something of the ways of life in those mighty common- 
wealths, just as English fiction written by Lancashire men 
about Lancashire people is saturated with the dialect, the 
local habits and scenery of that county. But wherever an 
English-speaking man of imagination may dwell, in Dorset 
or Calcutta or Indianapolis, he is subject to the strong arm 
of the empire of English literature; he cannot escape it; it 
tears him out of his obscure bed and makes a happy slave of 
him. He is assigned to the department of the service for 
which his gifts qualify him, and his special education is 
undertaken by drill-masters and captains who hail from 
provinces far from his birthplace. 

Dickens, who writes of London, influences Bret Harte, who 
writes of California, and Bret Harte influences Kipling, who 
writes of India. Each is intensely local in subject matter. 
The affinity between them is a matter of temperament, mani- 
fested, for example, in the swagger and exaggeration character- 
istic of all three. California did not "produce" Bret Harte; 
the power of Dickens was greater than that of the Sierras 
and the Golden Gate. Bret Harte created a California that 
never existed, and Indian gentlemen, Caucasian and Hindoo, 
tell us that Kipling invented an army and an empire unknown 
to geographers and war-offices. 

The ideas at work among these Enghsh men of letters 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 7 

are world-encircling and fly between book and brain. The 
dominant power is on the British Islands, and the prevail- 
ing stream of influence flows west across the Atlantic. 
Sometimes it turns and runs the other way. Poe influ- 
enced Rossetti; Whitman influenced Henley. For a century 
Cooper has been in command of the British literary marme. 
Literature is reprehensibly unpatriotic, even though its vota- 
ries are, as individual citizens, afflicted with local prides and 
hostilities. It takes only a dramatic interest in the guns of 
Yorktown. Its philosophy was nobly uttered by Gaston 
Paris in the College de France in 1870, when the city was 
beleaguered by the German armies: "Common studies, pur- 
sued in the same spirit, in all civilized countries, form, be- 
yond the restrictions of diverse and often hostile nationali- 
ties, a great country which no war profanes, no conqueror 
menaces, where souls find that refuge and unity which in 
former times was offered them by the city of God." The 
catholicity of English language and literature transcends 
the temporal boundaries of states. 

What, then, of the "provincialism" of the American prov- 
ince of the empire of British Hterature.'* Is it an observable 
general characteristic, and is it a virtue or a viccf* There is 
a sense in which American literature is not provincial enough. 
The most provincial of all literature is the Greek. The Greeks 
knew nothing outside of Greece and needed to know nothing. 
The Old Testament is tribal in its provinciality; its god is a 
local god, and its village police and sanitary regulations are 
erected into eternal laws. If this racial localism is not 
essential to the greatness of early literatures, it is inseparable 



8 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

from them; we find it there. It is not possible in our cos- 
mopoUtan age and there are few traces of it in American 
books. No American poet has sung of his neighbourhood 
with naive passion, as if it were all the world to him. Whit- 
man is pugnaciously American, but his sympathies are univer- 
sal, his vision is cosmic; when he seems to be standing in a 
city street looking at life, he is in a trance, and his spirit is 
racing with the winds. 

The welcome that we gave Whitman betrays the lack of an 
admirable kind of provincialism; it shows us defective in local 
security of judgment. Some of us have been so anxiously 
abashed by high standards of European culture that we 
could not see a poet in our own back yard until European 
poets and critics told us he was there. This is queerly contra- 
dictory to a disposition found in some Americans to disregard 
world standards and proclaim a third-rate poet as the Milton 
of Oshkosh or the Shelley of San Francisco. The passage in 
Lowell's "Fable for Critics" about "The American Bulwers, 
Disraelis and Scotts" is a spoonful of salt in the mouth of that 
sort of gaping village reverence. 

Of dignified and self-respecting provincialism, such as Pro- 
fessor Royce so eloquently advocates, there might well be more 
in American books. Our poets desert the domestic landscape 
to write pseudo-Elizabethan dramas and sonnets about Mont 
Blanc. They set up an artificial Tennyson park on the 
banks of the Hudson. Beside the shores of Lake Michigan 
they croon the love affairs of an Arab in the desert and his 
noble steed. This is not a very grave offence, for poets live 
among the stars, and it makes no difference from what point 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 9 

of the earth's surface they set forth on their aerial adventures. 
A Wisconsin poet may write very beautifully about nightin- 
gales, and a New England Unitarian may write beautifully 
about cathedrals; if it is beautiful, it is poetry, and all is well. 

The novelists are the worst offenders. There have been 
few of them; they have not been adequate in numbers or in 
genius to the task of describing the sections of the country, 
the varied scenes and habits from New Orleans to the Port- 
lands. And yet, small band as they are, with great domestic 
opportunities and responsibilities, they have devoted volumes 
to Paris, which has an able native corps of story-makers, and 
to Italy, where the home talent is first-rate. In this sense 
American literature is too globe-trotting, it has too little 
savour of the soil. 

Of provincialism of the narrowest type American writers, 
like other men of imagination, are not guilty to any reprehen- 
sible degree. It is a vice sometimes imputed to them by 
provincial critics who view literature from the office of a 
London weekly review or from the lecture rooms of American 
colleges. Some American writers are parochial, for example, 
Whittier. Others, like Mr. Henry James, are provincial in 
outlook, but cosmopolitan in experience, and reveal their 
provinciality by a self-conscious internationalism. Prob- 
ably English and French writers may be similarly classified 
as provincial or not. Mr. James says that Poe's collection 
of critical sketches "is probably the most complete and ex- 
quisite specimen of provincialism ever prepared for the edifi- 
cation of men."* It it nothing like that. It is an example 

*See page 149 



10 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

of what happens when a hack reviewer's work in local 
journals is collected into a volume because he turns out to 
be a genius. The list of Poe's victims is not more re- 
markable for the number of nonentities it includes than 
"The Lives of the Poets" by the great Doctor Johnson, 
who was hack for a bookseller, and "introduced" all the poets 
that the taste of the time encouraged the bookseller to print. 
Poe was cosmopolitan in spirit; his prejudices were personal 
and highly original, usually against the prejudices of his 
moment and milieu. Hawthorne is less provincial, in the 
derogatory sense, than his charming biographer, Mr. James, 
as will become evident if one compares Hawthorne's American 
notes on England, written in long ago days of national rancour, 
with Mr. James's British notes on America ("The American 
Scene"), written in our happy days of spacious vision. 

Emerson's ensphering universality overspreads Carlyle like 
the sky above a volcanic island. Indeed Carlyle (who knew 
more about American life and about what other people ought 
to do than any other British writer earlier than Mr. Chester- 
ton) justly complains that Emerson is not sufficiently local 
and concrete; Carlyle longs to see "some Event, Man's Life, 
American Forest, or piece of creation which this Emerson 
loves and wonders at, well Emersonized." Longfellow would 
not stay at home and write more about the excellent village 
blacksmith; he made poetical tours of Europe and translated 
songs and legends from several languages for the delight of 
the villagers who remained behind. Lowell was so heartily 
cosmopolitan that American newspapers accused him of 
Anglomania — which proves their provincialism but acquits 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS (Tij 

him. Mr. Howells has written a better book about Venice 
than about Ohio. Mark Twain Uved in every part of 
America, from Connecticut to Cahfornia, he wrote about 
every country under the sun (and about some countries 
beyond the sun), he is read by all sorts and conditions of 
men in the English-speaking ^^orld, and he is an adopted hero 
in Vienna. It is difficult to come to any conclusion about 
provincialism as a characteristic of American literature. 

American literature is on the whole idealistic, sweet, deli- 
cate, nicely finished. There is little of it which might not 
have appeared in the Youth's Companion. The notable 
exceptions are our most stalwart men of genius, Thoreau, 
Whitman, and Mark Twain. Any child can read American 
literature, and if it does not make a man of him, it at least 
will not lead him into forbidden realms. Indeed, American 
books too seldom come to grips with the problems of life, 
especially the books cast in artistic forms. The essayists, 
expounders, and preachers attack life vigorously and wrestle 
with the meaning of it. The poets are thin, moonshiny, 
meticulous in technique. Novelists are few and feeble, and 
dramatists are non-existent. These generalities, subject to 
exceptions, are confirmed by a reading of the first fifteen 
volumes of the Atlantic Monthly, which are a treasure-house 
of the richest period of American literary expression. In those 
volumes one finds a surprising number of vigorous, distin- 
guished papers on politics, philosophy, science, even on 
literature and art. Many talented men and women, whose 
names are not well remembered, are clustered there about 
the half dozen salient men of genius; and the collection gives 



12 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

one a sense that the New England mind (aided by the outly- 
ing contributors) was, in its one Age of Thought, an abundant 
and diversified power. But the poetry is not memorable, 
except for some verses by the few standard poets. And the 
fiction is naive. Edward Everett Hale's "The Man With- 
out a Country " is almost the only story there that one comes 
on with a thrill either of recognition or of discovery. 

It is hard to explain why the American, except in his ex- 
hortatory and passionately argumentative moods, has not 
struck deep into American life, why his stories and verses 
are, for the most part, only pretty things, nicely unimportant. 
Anthony Trollope had a theory that the absence of inter- 
national copyright threw our market open too unrestrictedly 
to the British product, that the American novel was an un- 
protected infant industry; we printed Dickens and the rest 
without paying royalty and starved the domestic manufac- 
turer. This theory does not explain. For there were many 
American novelists, published, read, and probably paid for 
their work. The trouble is that they lacked genius; they 
dealt with trivial, shght aspects of life; they did not take the 
novel seriously in the right sense of the word, though no 
doubt they were in another sense serious enough about their 
poor productions. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Huckle- 
berry Finn" are colossal exceptions to the prevailing weak- 
ness and superficiality of American novels. 

Why do American writers turn their backs on life, miss its 
intensities, its significance? The American Civil War was 
the most tremendous upheaval in the world after the Napo- 
leonic period. The imaginative reaction on it consists o|[ 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 13 

some fine essays, Lincoln's addresses, Whitman's war poetry, 
" Uncle Tom's Cabin " (which came before the war but is part 
of it), one or two passionate hymns by Whittier, the second 
series of the "Biglow Papers," Hale's "The Man Without 
a Country" — and what else? The novels laid in war-time 
are either sanguine melodrama or absurd idyls of maidens 
whose lovers are at the front — a tragic theme if tragically 
and not sentimentally conceived. Perhaps the bullet that 
killed Theodore Winthrop deprived us of our great novelist 
of the Civil War, for he was on the right road. In a general 
speculation such a might-have-been is not altogether futile; 
if Milton had died of whooping cough there would not have 
been any "Paradise Lost"; the reverse of this is that some 
geniuses whose works ought inevitably to have been produced 
by this or that national development may have died too soon. 
This suggestion, however, need not be gravely argued. The 
fact is that the American Hterary imagination after the Civil 
War was almost sterile. If no books had been written, the 
failure of that conflict to get itseK embodied in some master- 
pieces would be less disconcerting. But thousands of books 
were written by people who knew the war at first hand and 
who had literary ambition and some skill, and from all these 
books none rises to distinction. 

An example of what seems to be the American habit of writ- 
ing about everything except American life, is the work of 
General Lew Wallace. Wallace was one of the important 
secondary generals in the Civil War, distinguished at Fort 
Donelson and at Shiloh. After the war he wrote"Ben-Hur,"a 
doubly abominable book, because it is not badly written and it 



\ 



i> 



14 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

shows a lively imagination. There is nothing in it so valu- 
able, so dramatically significant as a week in Wallace's war 
experiences. "Ben-Hur," fit work for a country clergyman 
with a pretty literary gift, is a ridiculous inanity to come 
from a man who has seen the things that Wallace saw ! It is 
understandable that the man of experience may not write at 
all, and, on the other hand, that the man of secluded life 
may have the imagination to make a military epic. But for 
a man crammed with experience of the most dramatic sort 
and discovering the ability and the ambition to write — for 
him to make spurious oriental romances which achieve an 
enormous popularity ! The case is too grotesque to be typical, 
yet it is exceptional in degree rather than in kind. The Ameri- 
can literary artist has written about everything under the 
skies except what matters most in his own life. General 
Grant's plain autobiography, not art and of course not at- 
tempting to be, is better literature than most of our books 
in artistic forms, because of its intellectual integrity and the 
profound importance of the subject-matter. 

Our dreamers have dreamed about many wonderful things, 
but their faces have been averted from the mightier issues of 
life. They have been high-minded, fine-grained, eloquent in 
manner, in odd contrast to the real or reputed vigour and 
crudeness of the nation. In the hundred years from Irving's 
first romance to Mr. Howells's latest unromantic novel, most 
of our books are eminent for just those virtues which America 
is supposed to lack. Their physique is feminine; they are 
fanciful, dainty, reserved; they are Uterose, sophisticated in 
craftsmanship, but innocently unaware of the profound agi- 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 15 

tations of American life, of life everywhere. Those who strike 
the deeper notes of reality, Whitman, Thoreau, Mark Twain, 
Mrs. Stowe in her one great book, Whittier, Lowell and Emer- 
son at their best, are a powerful minority. The rest, beauti- 
ful and fine in spirit, too seldom show that they are conscious 
of contemporaneous realities, too seldom vibrate with a 
tremendous sense of life. 

The Jason of western exploration writes as if he had passed 
his life in a library. The Ulysses of great rivers and perilous 
seas is a connoisseur of Japanese prints. The warrior of 
'Sixty-one rivals Miss Marie Corelh. The mining engineer 
carves cherry stones. He who is figured as gaunt, hardy and 
aggressive, conquering the desert with the steam locomotive, 
sings of a pretty little rose in a pretty little garden. The 
judge, haggard with experience, who presides over the most 
tragi-comic divorce court ever devised by man, writes love 
stories that would have made Jane Austen smile. 

Mr. Arnold Bennett is reported to have said that if Balzac 
had seen Pittsburgh, he would have cried : " Give me a pen !" 
The truth is, the whole country is crying out for those who 
will record it, satirize it, chant it. As literary material, it 
is virgin land, ancient as life and fresh as a wilderness. 
American literature is one occupation which is not over- 
crowded, in which, indeed, there is all too little competition 
for the newcomer to meet. There are signs that some 
earnest young writers are discovering the fertiUty of a soil 
that has scarcely been scratched. 

American fiction shows all sorts of merit, but the merits are 
not assembled, concentrated; the fine is weak, and the strong 



16 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

is crude. The stories of Poe, Hawthorne, Howells, James, 
Aldrich, Bret Harte, are admirable in manner, but they are 
thin in substance, not of large vitality. On the other hand, 
some of the stronger American fictions fail in workmanship; 
for example, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which is still vivid and 
moving long after its tractarian interest has faded; the novels 
of Frank Norris, a man of great vision and high purpose, 
who attempted to put national economics into something 
like an epic of daily bread; and Herman Melville's "Moby 
Dick," a madly eloquent romance of the sea. A few Ameri- 
can noveUsts have felt the meaning of the life they knew and 
have tried sincerely to set it down, but have for various 
reasons failed to make first-rate novels; for example, Edward 
Eggleston, whose stories of early Indiana have the breath of 
actuality in them; Mr. E. W. Howe, author of "The Story 
of a Country Town"; Harold Frederic, a man of great ability, 
whose work was growing deeper, more significant when he 
died; George W. Cable, whose novels are unsteady and senti- 
mental, but who gives a genuine impression of having por- 
trayed a city and its people; and Stephen Crane, who, dead 
at thirty, had given in "The Red Badge of Courage" and 
"Maggie" the promise of better work. Of good short 
stories America has been prolific. Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, 
Mrs. Annie Trumbull Slosson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rowland 
Robinson, H. C. Bunner, Edward Everett Hale, Frank Stock- 
ton, Joel Chandler Harris, and "O. Henry" are some of those 
whose short stories are perfect in their several kinds. But 
the American novel, which multiplies past counting, remains 
an inferior production. 



GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 17 

On a private sheK of contemporary fiction and drama in 
the English language are the works of ten British authors, 
Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, 
Mr. Eden Phillpotts, Mr. George Moore, Mr. Leonard Mer- 
rick, Mr. J. C. Snaith, Miss May Smclair, Mr. Wilham De 
Morgan, Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Mr. Joseph Com-ad, Mr. 
Bernard Shaw, yes, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Beside them 
I find but two Americans, Mrs. Edith Wharton and Mr. 
Theodore Dreiser. There may be others, for one cannot 
pretend to know all the living novelists and dramatists. Yet 
for every American that should be added, I would agree to 
add four to the British list. However, a contemporary liter- 
ature that includes Mrs. Wharton's "Ethan Frome" and 
Mr. Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt" both published last year, 
is not to be despaired of. 

In the course of a century a few Americans have said in 
memorable words what life meant to them. Their perform- 
ance, put together, is considerable, if not imposing. Any 
sense of dissatisfaction that one feels in contemplating it is 
due to the disproportion between a limited expression and 
the multifarious immensity of the country. Our Uterature, 
judged by the great literatures contemporaneous with it, 
is insufficient to the opportunity and the need. The Ameri- 
can Spirit may be figured as petitioning the Muses for twelve 
noveUsts, ten poets, and eight dramatists, to be delivered 
at the earliest possible moment. 



CHAPTER II 
IRVING 

"A FREE PEOPLE," says Irving, "are apt to be grave and 
thoughtful. They have high and important matters to 
occupy their minds. They feel that it is their right, their 
interest, and their duty, to mingle in public concerns, and 
to watch over the general welfare. The continual exercise 
of the mind on political topics gives intenser habits of think- 
ing, and a more serious and earnest demeanour. A nation 
becomes less gay, but more intellectually active and vigorous. 
It evinces less play of the fancy, but more power of the 
imagination; less taste and elegance, but more grandeur of 
mind; less animated vivacity, but deeper enthusiasm. 

"It is when men are shut out of the regions of manly 
thought, by a despotic government; when every grave and 
lofty theme is rendered perilous to discussion and almost to 
reflection; it is then that they turn to the safer occupa- 
tions of taste and amusement; trifles rise to importance, 
and occupy the craving activity of intellect. No being is 
more void of care and reflection than the slave; none dances 
more gayly, in his intervals of labour; but make him free, 
give him rights and interests to guard, and he becomes 
thoughtful and laborious." 

Had the creator of Diedrich Knickerbocker, Ichabod Crane, 

18 



IRVING 19 

and Rip Van Winkle liabitually dwelt in the sober mood of 
the foregoing passage, he would have been an obscure case 
in support of his own queer theory. Whether or not merri- 
ment and sweet fancy were oppressed by the spirit of liberty 
which dominated America a century ago, the genius of 
Irving refused to succumb. The piper of the mystic song 
of Liberty may have led the children under the mountain 
of Civil Rights; Irving is the boy who came back. "A grown- 
up child," he calls himself, speaking in the person of Geoffrey 
Crayon. Through a long and peaceful life he remains im- 
penitently gay. ^Vhile Governor Clinton, "amid the accla- 
mations of the multitude," symbolizes the completion of the 
Erie Canal by pouring two kegs of Lake Erie water into the 
Atlantic, Irving peoples the banks of the Hudson with elves 
and goblins. The raiboad soon renders the Erie Canal as 
obsolete as any piece of Egyptian engineering; but Irving's 
creations are not displaced by successors; his fresh voice of 
laughter and romance still rings solitary along the Hudson 
palisades. 

Irving was a child of fortune. His father was in comfort- 
able circumstances, and the young man was able to indulge 
in three pleasures which cherished his talents : innocent idling 
among the people of New York, especially in the older parts 
of the town and along the water front; writing and publishing 
for the sport of it; and travelling in Europe. The delicate 
state of his health made it necessary, or advisable, that he 
should make sea voyages. Since his invalidity did not 
assume painful forms nor fetter his work either as man of 
letters or man of affairs, it may be regarded as fortunate, for 



20 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

it won him dispensations which his father would not perhaps 
have accorded to a robust young man. Irving's genius was 
not so powerful that it would have hewn works of art out of 
strife and poverty. His gentle fancy was nourished by well- 
being, by leisure to indulge his amiable indolence, to sit on 
the bank and watch life stream by, to catch a glimpse of a 
comic old face in the crowd or the fluttering ribbon on a 
girl's bonnet. Yet he was not an irresponsible idler who 
filled his knapsack from other peoples' larders and paid his 
debt to the heirs of the almoners in priceless books. He was 
a good business man and self-reliant. At the age of twenty- 
six he proved his literary gifts and won flattering applause 
by his "Knickerbocker's History of New York"; but he 
rejected the alluring career of letters, went into partnership 
with his brother and for ten years devoted himself to trade. 
It was only when the business failed that he published 
his second volume, " The Sketch Book," which was so popular 
as to warrant, not only from an artistic but from a prac- 
tical point of view, his committing himself to the literary 
career. 

He had justified his leisure and he continued to earn 
a right to it. When he loafed he invited his soul and 
not the censure of his family. His was a happy and normal 
life. He wandered through the woods communing with 
pixies and the ghosts of mythical Dutchmen; his fancy kept 
company with tatterdemalions and tap-room idlers; but he 
was a handsome, fashionable young bachelor, and he lived 
amid the conventional "best society." If the death of his 
sweetheart threw a cloud of melancholy over his life, the 



IRVING 21 

shadow of the cloud is not upon his work. There is no trace 
in his writings of the tragedy of actual life. 

His portrait is a most satisfying presentment of the kind 
of man who ought to have written his books. It shows a 
broad brow with the hair curled youthfully about the temples- 
a straight, sensible nose; a wide, humorous mouth twitching 
at the corners even in the repose of an engraving; eyes clear, 
observant, not piercing; the whole face placid and prosperous; 
the head held with dignity above a full chest. 

The picture of our first man of letters is also a portrait 
of a gentleman-scholarly diplomat. Irving was minister 
to Spain and discharged his public duties in a creditable 
manner. He received whatever honour academic and 
political officialdom can bestow upon a literary man, and the 
pride and affection of his countrymen followed him for forty 
years. He was welcomed in Europe, in Thackeray's happy 
phrase, as the " first ambassador whom the New World of 
Letters sent to the Old." 

Perhaps the old world of letters was not in aching need 
of a messenger from our world of letters, but our world was 
starving for a voice of romance. Irving taught America 
that the star of romance shines above the forests of Astoria 
as truly as above Alhambra; indeed the spell that Irving 
casts over Astoria makes us forget that he was playing 
press-agent for a land-grabber and a swindler of Indians. 
Irving also taught us that the literary spirit is whimsical and 
expresses life by devious indirections, that it says what one 
would not expect it to say and blandly ignores momentous 
matters. Irving inaugurated American literature not with 



£2 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

the trumpets of rebellion, not with an epic elevation befitting 
a people who had conquered a wilderness, but with quiet, 
old-fashioned humour, a cultivated reserved accent, urbane 
manners, and a smiling indifference to certain local passions. 
Even at home he is a sympathetic and observant tourist, 
intimately acquainted with what he sees but not immersed 
in its currents of thought. He does not make us feel what 
most stirred the hearts and perplexed the minds of any con- 
siderable class of Americans in the year 1825. From the 
social contests, the clashing forces of mind and of economic 
necessities, the industrial and spiritual developments by 
reason of which we are now alive and what we are, Irving is 
almost as aloof as Poe. 

It may be that the apparent contrast between Irving's 
interests and what we now imagine to have been the most 
intense interests of his contemporaries is due to his tempera- 
ment and to that side of it which enabled him to seek the 
society of the immortals. Perhaps a man more soaked with 
reality could not have come forth from the life about him and 
risen above the threshhold of expression. There was in his 
time but a small recognized leisure class, a thin cultivated 
stratum of people upheld by church, university, family 
tradition and well-founded prosperity. The best brains of 
the people were busy with the problem of getting a livelihood. 
A man had to be doing something obviously worth while 
or lose seK-respect and the respect of his neighbours. A long- 
estabhshed culture that lives at the expense of the multitude 
(such is the dependence of culture in all capitaHst societies) 
may be unjustified from the point of view of social equity; 



IRVING 23 

but at least such a culture has leisure and traming to express 
itself in art. In a young country, for the settlement of 
which the only motive is to find a hving for one's self by 
labour or exploitation (and that is the motive for the coloniz- 
ing of America despite the stories of the quest for rehgious 
liberty and other superstitions of liistory), every able man 
works; the drone is either the unfit, incapable of producing 
literature or anything else, or the exploiter on the alert 
for commercial advantage. The worthy individual who wins 
exemption from the workaday struggle wins it after a youth 
of toil or business responsibiUty, and he is then not habituated 
to aesthetic interests and the pursuits of art. 

Before Irving most American books that remain important, 
were written by men of affairs, politicians and clergymen 
such as Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Franklin, and 
the orators and pamphleteers of the Revolution. After 
Irving had become famous there grew up in America academic 
societies which favoured the muse of the New England group 
and constituted a circl^s^ encouraging readers. There also ^ 
arose the commercial institution of professional journaUsm 
which gave a career to a few whose pens, competent to earn 
some sort of living, were also competent to do work for the 
ages. The first flower of this institution was Poe. 

In America there was no such thing as pensioned authors, 
idle clergymen living on church incomes and devoting their 
time to Hterature, holders of easy places under the govern- 
ment and enabled to spend their afternoons in writing. In 
Irving's youth the temptation to write for a livelihood was 
slight; the economic conditions put no premium on labours of 



+ 



24 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

the fancy. To be a literary man in the society that sur- 
rounded Irving was to be a dreamer and wanderer, A man 
with a vital sense of reality would have been in the thick of 
the practical struggle. In a society which has no literary 
tradition, which is not accustomed to having a poet or two 
in the neighbourhood, the first man to lift himself to the 
privileged class of authors is the man of light and un- 
troubled fancy. Irving's circumstances relieved him from the 
harshest necessity of earning his daily bread. Life did not 
bear hard on him and he did not look hard at life. Fortune 
and his hghtness of spirit agreed to let him play with litera- 
ture until he and the world found it a good business for him. 
Irving initiated our imaginative literature in a holiday 
mood. He and his brother William, with J. K. Paulding, a 
writer of some experience, founded in 1807 a biweekly 
periodical called Salmagundi. It was a pastime entered into 
with the enthusiasm which many a young man has thrown 
into a journalistic venture and has maintained until unpaid 
printers' bills have stifled jubilant enterprise. Had Irving 
and his brother been poor, as they were manly and honest, 
they must have gone immediately and with their whole 
energy into gainful occupations. Irving would have had 
no apprenticeship in which to try his pen; in the words of 
the valedictory of Salmagundi, he would have let "immor- 
tality sUp through his fingers." As things were, he could 
practise writing while to senior eyes he was respectably 
studying law; and he could get his first work published with- 
out waiting upon the rigours of the market. Before business 
responsibilities fell on him he had "commenced author" in 



IRVING 25 

a small way and discovered his talents. In the slight papers 
of Salmagundi, modelled upon the English periodical essay- 
ists, he had sharpened his style for "Knickerbocker's History 
of New York." 

The "History of New York" is a merry piece of foohng. 
It is a parody of the pretentious historical style and a satire 
on the spurious heroic in colonial legend. It is full of 
burlesque yarns, extravagant adventures, and Jolly carica- 
tures of the Dutch burghers. The literary skill of the book 
lies in its sustained narrative swing, the grave rhythm of the 
periods which carry nonsensical matter. The mere joker 
cannot achieve this; it is true comic art. 

Soon after Irving had tried his wings in the "History of 
New York," he was obliged to fold them and content him- 
self with the solid earth. He engaged in business, and five 
years later went on a commercial errand to England. He 
remained in Europe seventeen years. In 1820 he published 
"The Sketch Book," a collection of miscellaneous pieces that 
had appeared in American periodicals. Among them were 
"Rip Van Winkle," and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." 
Rip took his place at once among the favourite heroes of 
fantastic story, and later he became doubly endeared to the 
American people by his incarnation in the genial person 
of Joseph Jefferson. Irving's tale is so simple, so familiar, 
that in rereading it one may easily take it for granted and 
not be struck by its genius. To be convinced that it is a 
masterpiece one needs but to reflect how infrequently such a 
tender weanling is adopted as the child of time. A little 
thing that happens seldom is important. 



26 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

The story of Rip is based on a German legend, and the 
origin accounts in some measure for the elementary direct- 
ness of the tale, a virtue that sophisticated art cannot easily 
counterfeit, but can easily destroy. Irving has preserved 
the quality of a folk-tale, and at the same time he permits 
himself the privilege of winking at the reader over the head 
of Knickerbocker. 

"Rip Van Winkle" is not an accidental, solitary success. 
All the stories in "The Sketch Book," notably "The Legend 
of Sleepy Hollow," and other yarns comic and creepy in 
"Bracebridge Hall," and "Tales of A Traveller," are well 
told, with sprightly verve and grace. There are no after- 
thoughts or under-purposes. The attitude is that of a 
familiar raconteur who has no object in the world but to 
entertain his company, to puff his pipe in fireside ease and 
give the tale as 'twas given him. This style of narrative 
never hints that it is difficult to do and deceives one into over- 
looking its remarkable rare excellence. 

Irving's avowed debt to Goldsmith and his fondness for 
tales of British squiredom warrant to some extent the view 
that he is an imitator of the English essayists and character- 
sketchers of the eighteenth century. He has been called a 
"belated" American Goldsmith. There has arisen in. 
one quarter the curious notion (a theory running wild 
with a little fact in its mouth) that American literature 
is habitually a generation behind English Uterature. 
Even Holmes, a very modern man, is accounted for in 
terms of the "eighteenth-century spirit." The truth seems 
to be that nineteenth- century thought everywhere 



IRVING 27 

is eclectic, and of its many voices each is germane to the 
times. 

Any man, anywhere, writing at the opening of the last 
century is inevitably dependent on the eighteenth century. 
In England a small group of men. Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge, 
Keats, Shelley, were in revolt against the eighteenth century; 
they withdrew from the dominion of Doctor Jolinson and made 
splendid new alliances with Milton and Thomas Browne. As 
time goes by, this group of revolters grows greater and greater 
in oiu* admiration, until to our eyes they stand for their times 
and we see them like a range of hills beyond which lies the 
eighteenth-century plateau. But this is an illusion of per- 
spective. A survey of the country shows that Keats and Lamb 
and Coleridge did not dominate their own age. Their con- 
temporaries, Southey, Scott, even Bryon, were not so clearly 
emancipated from the preceding age. In literature the 
transition from period to period is gradual like the passing 
from adolescence to manhood; the eighteenth century never 
ended, and the nineteenth century did not at any definite 
moment begin. Literature is a continuous processus; one 
writer looks a httle ahead, another harks back to an immedi- 
ately or distantly earlier time. Irving is no more filled with 
the eighteenth-century spirit than are many of his British 
contemporaries. Byron and Scott are his heroes no less than 
Goldsmith, and he makes pilgrimages to Newstead Abbey and 
Abbottsford. His attitude toward Johnson is that of the 
nineteenth-century romantic making a case for the gentle 
poetic Goldsmith against the kindly tyranny of the critical 
prosaic bear. 



28 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Irving is not, of course, akin to the spirit of revolt that now 
seems the most significant fact of the age of Wordsworth; he 
is a conventional man, with no very profound convictions, 
no intense theory of hfe. His philosophy is that of the 
amiable, gifted man of the world of all times and places; "I 
have always had an opinion that much good might be done 
by keeping mankind in good humour with one another." 
Such a philosophy does not proceed from a nature that is 
torn by everlasting problems, but it is not referable to any 
special period of literary thought; it is as near to Scott as to 
Addison, it is as remote from Swift as from Shelley. 

Irving's nature combines good portions of sentiment and 
manly common sense. In no one book of his are these ele- 
ments more harmoniously blended than in his "Life of Gold- 
smith." Here he is not in whimsical masquerade as Knicker- 
bocker or Crayon, and he is not labouring over a complex 
subject as in his biographies of Columbus and Washington. 
The man Irving, talks with an old-fashioned, dignified in- 
formality about the man Goldsmith. The book is one of the 
masterpieces of literary biography, attracting the reader to 
author and to subject, like Walton's lives of Donne and 
Herbert. He understands Goldsmith and his friends and 
is at home in their society. He is quite free from the later 
fallacy of biographical essayists, that criticism is a science. 
He has the acumen of humorous good sense and the gift of 
appreciating the charm of others in the act of being charming 
himself. He pays his respects to Boswell with good-natured 
sharpness. "Boswell," he says, "was a unitarian in his ht- 
erary devotion and disposed to worship none but Johnson." 



IRVING 29 

** Never since the days of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza 
has there been presented to the world a more whimsically 
contrasted pair of associates than Johnson and Boswell." 

At about the time that Irving was penning these words, 
a heavier humour was being brandished over Boswell's head 
by Thomas Carlyle; the careers of Goldsmith and Johnson 
were being subjected to philosophic inquiry (or unphilo- 
sophic assertion) more profound and more puzzle-headed 
than a simple man hke Irving was capable of. Irving's un- 
laboured appreciation seems more appropriate to his subject 
than the more complex disputes of Victorian criticism; his 
talents conform naturally to a subject that he chose in 
obedience to temperamental kinship. The "few desultory 
remarks" at the close of his book are none the less wise for 
their smiling graciousness. Goldsmith, he says, carries 
throughout his career "the wayward elfin spirit." The same 
spirit accompanied his American biographer. 

The limitations of the talent that makes the "Life of 
Goldsmith" so entirely satisfying are revealed in the volu- 
minous biography of Washington. That is a patient, labori- 
ous book upon which Irving spent years of study. When he 
undertook it he had become a responsible ambassador with a 
sense of the formal obhgations of patriotism and scholarship. 
The work forced his genius out of its natural course. I do 
not know how historians regard his "Life of Washington," 
whether it is to them more or less sound than the investiga- 
tions of other historians in those days when chroniclers were 
men of letters unharassed by "scientific" conscience. To a 
casual reader the book sounds tired, and that is a defect per- 



30 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

mitted to accurate historians, but not to myth-makers and 
essayists who in other works have won us with unveracious 
stories. 

The study of Washington was carried on in the closing 
years of Irving's hfe and was interrupted by illness, which 
may explain its lack of vivacity. Except for this lack, the 
tone of the book is admirable. Irving's candour and reserve 
deliver him from the temptations of hero-worship. "We 
have avoided," he says, "rhetorical amplifications and em- 
bellishments, and all gratuitous assumptions, and have sought 
by simple and truthful details to give his character an oppor- 
tunity of developing itself." During Irving's life there grew 
up and sohdified an inflexible image which pious oratory and 
uncritical patriotism hallowed as the father of our country. 
That dehumanized myth ought to have been replaced by 
Irving's manly portrait. Perhaps the length of his work 
diminished its effect, for although the four substantial 
volumes were well received, and an audience was ensured by 
the popularity of author and subject, the public naturally 
contents itself with short accounts of our first President, and 
does not make household companions of Irving's long book 
nor of Spark's compendious documents. The restoration of 
Washington to human proportions was a task left to our 
contemporary, Mr. Owen Wister. 

Irving's genius is not that of a great historian but rather 
that of a picturesque chronicler who selects the adventurous 
and the vivid. He is therefore more successful with Spanish 
history and biography, than with the annals of America. 
His "Life of Columbus" is an absorbing book. We may 



IRVING 31 

credit his statement that it is "faithfully digested" from a 
great variety of authentic sources, and we may justly re- 
main indifferent to the degree of error which it may betray 
in the light of subsequent studies. From the most repre- 
hensible errors it is splendidly free, from the errors of stupid- 
ity, from the errors that attend a lack of imagination. 

Is it too much to say that Irving's style, resonant and full 
of colour, set a standard for American historians, to which is 
owing in some measure the rich readability of Prescott and 
Parkman? And is it presumptuous to suggest that there has 
departed a glory from historical writing which in these alert 
and many-talented days might advantageously be recovered 
by those historiographers who "discourse of affairs orderly 
as they were done?" Of the arid and cautiously accurate 
there is no lack, and there is plenty, too, of the over-rhetorical 
which results from the efforts of mediocrity to sound the 
pipes of eloquence. Professional historians who would be 
neither dry nor sentimental might profitably go to school to 
Irving and learn that verity is not incompatible with the 
stately charm of his style. The mind is stimulated, certainly 
it is not distracted from the true order of events, by such a 
sentence as this from the "Life of Columbus": "What 
consoled the Spaniards for the asperity of the soil was to 
observe among the sands of those crystal streams glittering 
particles of gold, which, though scanty in quantity, were 
regarded as an earnest of the wealth locked up within the 
mountains." It may be that the pleasant appeal of that 
sentence to an American ear is due to the subject, wealth, in 
which only America among the nations of the earth has 



32 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

evinced any considerable interest — a bit of irony not out 
of place in a chapter on Irving, for it was he who invented 
the phrase "almighty dollar." 

The flower of Irving's residence in Spain and his study of 
Spanish chronicle is "The Alhambra." This book is sketchy 
and informal, and in it the exigencies of history do not compel 
Irving's genius beyond its delicate powers. His style is fit 
for this enchanted palace; the fragmentary traditions fur- 
nish him with the sort of fanciful short story which he 
knew how to touch with pretty skill. In these inconse- 
quential tales, spun with fine zest and pretending to no 
virtuous purpose but the giving of pleasure, Irving 
meets the genius of the Arabian nights and is not dwarfed 
by it. 

Certain American books have sufficient depth and breadth 
to be called masterpieces; they stand self-contained and all 
but assured of immortality; such books are "The Scarlet 
Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," "Uncle Tom's 
Cabm," "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," Huckle- 
berry Finn." Other books, like Emerson's "Essays" and 
Whitman's poems, contain matter of loftiest quality yet in 
such brief form that the author's title to mastery lies in the 
collected work, rather than in any single unit of art. In 
neither of these ultimate classes can Irving be included. 
Though one would not wish to quarrel with whoever should 
call "Rip Van Winkle" a self -secure masterpiece, never- 
theless Irving is, for all his bulky histories, essentially 
a sketcher, a miscellanist. His place is on one of the gen- 
tler lower slopes of literature in the company suggested 



IRVING S3 

by the sub-title of " Braeebridge Hall" — "The Humour- 
ists, a Medley." 

BIOGRAPHICAL, NOTE 

Irving was born in New York City, April 3, 1783. He died 
at Sunnyside, near Tarrytown, New York, November 28, 
1859. He travelled in Europe from 1804 to 1806. He 
studied law and was admitted to the bar, but did not practise. 
He went to England on business in 1815. The business failed 
the next year, but he remained in England until 1820. The 
next nine years he spent on the continent of Europe. In 1826 
he was attache of the United States legation in Spain, and 
in 1829 he was appointed secretary of legation at London. 
From 1832 to 1842 he lived at Sunnyside on the Hudson. 
He was Minister to Spain from 1842 to 1846. The rest of 
his life was spent in New York and at Sunnyside. 

His works are Salmagundi, 1807—1808; Knickerbocker's 
History of New York, 1809; Sketch-Book, 1819-1820; Brace- 
bridge Hall, 1822; Tales of a Traveller, 1824; Life and Voy- 
ages of Columbus, 1828; The Conquest of Granada, 1829; 
The Companions of Columbus, 1831; The Alhambra, 1832; 
Crayon Miscellanies, 1835; Astoria, 1836; Adventures 
of Captain Bonneville, 1837; Oliver Goldsmith, 1849; 
Mahomet and His Successors, 1849; Wolfert's Roost, 
1855; Life of Washington, 1855 — 1859; Spanish Papers, 
1866. 

It is worth noting, as a matter of literary history and as 
an example of Irving's magnanimity, that he had planned 



34 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

to write the chronicle of the conquest of Mexico, but when he 
heard that Prescott had the same plan, he yielded the subject 
to his junior. Irving was not married. His nephew Pierre 
Irving, edited his "Life and Letters." The best biography 
of Irving is that by Charles Dudley Warner in American Men 
of Letters. 



CHAPTER III 
COOPER 

In 1820, when Cooper was thirty years old, he read a feeble 
conventional English novel; irritated by its futility, he an- 
nounced to his wife that he could write a better one, and the 
result was his first book, "Precaution." It is a poor book, 
because it is not grounded on the author's experience, and. 
because Cooper had not the kind of imagination that can 
give reality to human characters in ordinary social sur- 
roundings. But he learned his lesson and turned immedi- 
ately to outdoor scenes with which he was familiar, and to 
adventures which he had witnessed or which were appro- 
priate to the ground he knew. "The Spy," a tale of the 
Revolution, was successful, and he followed it industri- 
ously with "The Pioneers," "The Pilot," "The Last of the 
Mohicans." 

Those who insist that a young country ought to produce a 
"young" literature, will find Cooper a rather valid subsump- 
tion under a theory that is not quite valid but is largely a 
matter of verbal analogy. What does "young" mean? Our 
Uterature is a pleasant- voiced, fine-mannered gentleman, well 
past middle age. There is all too little of the untamed boy 
about it. But Cooper is in many senses "young." Though 
he was a dignified and self-consciously important personage, 

35 



36 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

without a touch of the boyishness that bubbles out of Irving, 
Mark Twain, and Stevenson, yet his art never grows up: 
it is always immature, awkward, a thousand years younger 
than the craftsmanship that Kipling had learned at twenty- 
one. That the young of all ages all over the world welcomed 
Cooper is an obvious fact. Such undeniable "youth" is a 
warrant of immortality which adult criticism cannot gain- 
say and would not if it could. 

How many of us at the age of fifteen have gone to the public 
library, taken out a story by Cooper, returned it two days 
later and taken another, then another, allowing no rival 
author to intrude in the breathless succession! That in 
the years when we inhabited Cooper's world for two months 
at a stretch we were capable of giving other months of equally 
unbroken attention to the interminable Henty and Oliver 
Optic, somewhat tarnishes the lustre of our admiration; it 
enables our elders to discredit Cooper by pointing to the com- 
pany of uninspired story-tellers with whom in our innocence 
we indiscriminately grouped him, and the wise ones can also 
indulge in dark and slurring hints at another kind of litera- 
ture which we read, likewise in our innocence, yet with a 
thrilling sense of guilt. 

We are rather stumped for an answer to the argument 
that boys who like Henty and certain unnamable authors 
just as heartily as they like Cooper and Scott and "Tom 
Brown " are not trustworthy judges. On our side, however, 
is an international league of youth; boys of alien speech are 
reading Le Tueur des Daims and Der Letzte der Mohikaner. 
Cooper's books were published, as they came out, in thirty 



COOPER 37 

different European cities; he was almost as famous on the 
continent as Scott and Byron, The consensus of the races 
and the generations has stamped him with approval which 
some of our other favourites have not received. Our culti- 
vated sires must, then, lay aside Meredith and Anatole 
France long enough to tell us why Uncas is as familiar to the 
school boys of Berlin as to those of New York, and why in 
nearly a hundred years Cooper's popularity has not abated. 

Pretty work the elders make of explaining it! They talk 
about style, character-drawing, the "epic" of pioneer life, 
and they attribute to this most popular yarn-spinner liter- 
ary virtues no more appropriate to him than to the graven 
images of Chingachgook that used to stand before the tobacco 
shops. Style.f* His style is one of the obstacles that his 
story plows through, like Bumppo shouldering through under- 
brush. Listen to this! 

"Chafed by the silent imputation, and inwardly troubled 
by so unaccountable a circumstance, the chief advanced to 
the side of the bed, and stooping, cast an incredulous look 
at the features, as if distrusting their reality. His daughter 
was dead. The unerring feeling of nature for a moment pre- 
vailed and the old warrior hid his eyes in sorrow." How can 
a boy like such writing as that, pompous, inhuman, erring 
against every feeling of nature.? The boy does not like it, 
he disregards it. He understands that the daughter is dead, 
a fact plainly stated amid the majestic polysyllables, and 
that the chief is sorry. The boy goes on with the story and 
leaves it to the critics to worry about the style. 

Cora and Alice are racing with death! It is an exciting 



38 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

race which any full-blooded person will follow, must follow, 
fascinated to the end. The sophisticated reader condescends 
to watch it, is ensnared in the interest of it all, and then 
suddenly, Cooper calls his heroines "distressed females." 
That is almost fatal; illusion wavers; but the sensitive 
spectator grits his teeth, recovers and continues to watch. 
Cooper gets him and holds him in spite of everything. Mean- 
while "distressed females" has not distracted the attention 
of the boy. Cooper may call the ladies anything he likes 
so long as he does not leave a doubt as to who they are and 
what is happening to them; and he never leaves any such 
doubt. 

Some books have cast over the young of all generations 
a spell which no mature experience dissolves, for example, 
"Robinson Crusoe," "Two Years Before the Mast," and 
"Treasure Island." The grown man who has read widely 
knows that "Treasure Island" is in admirable style. He 
joins with his son in praising it, but they do not praise just 
the same things. If the book were rewritten so that all the 
rhythm were knocked out of the sentences, it would be de- 
stroyed for many adults, whereas the essential narrative 
would hold the boy almost as well as the book does in its 
verbal perfection. For the boy and for most readers Cooper 
is as good with his faults as he would be without them. To 
foreign readers some of his faults are not evident; translation 
removes them, or unfamiliarity with English softens them. 
Balzac, who admired Cooper, would have shivered at French 
as bad as Cooper's English. "That," said Balzac to a friend, 
"is Fenimore Cooper's latest work. It is fine, it is grand, it 



COOPER 39 

is intensely interesting. I know no one but Walter Scott who 
has ever risen to that grandeur and serenity of colouring." 

It is the stuff of Cooper that counts. His lakes and woods 
and seas, unpoetically as he conveys them, are in themselves 
poetic, a wonder of wilderness and water alive with rapid, 
various adventure, heart-stopping ambuscades, the steering 
of a ship past treacherous rocks. It matters not to the un- 
sophisticated mind that Natty Bumppo talks sometimes like 
Cooper and sometimes like the unliterary woodsman that he 
is. The enjoyment of the critical Olympian is disturbed 
by violations of character, especially of the diction of 
character, by preposterous phrasing, by ungainliness which 
is due not to untutored simplicity, but to an unmastered 
bookish vocabulary. When the professional critic, knowing 
that Cooper is good, sets out to praise him, he often makes 
the mistake of denying Cooper's faults, like a romantic who 
should say of a squinting woman: "I love her and admire her; 
therefore she has lovely eyes." 

Cooper's immortality need not be explained by standards 
to which he does not come up. It is no credit to Cooper, 
or to the critic, to attribute to the Deerslayer stories per- 
fections without which they have survived splendidly and 
can continue to survive. Professor Lounsbury says that 
"The Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer" are pure works 
of art with only slight defects. Then ensues a spirited and 
delightful contest between Professor Lounsbury and Mark 
Twain, who proves that Cooper breaks eighteen out of nine- 
teen rules of fiction. The whole contest, a very exhilarating 
piece of critical by-play, is on a false plane, and of course 



40 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Professor Lounsbury and other critics are responsible for 
putting it there. After the contestants have mauled Cooper 
on both sides. Natty Bumppo shoulders his long rifle and 
strides off as if nothing had happened. Nothing has hap- 
pened that really concerns him. 

Professor Lounsbury thinks that Cooper's style suffered 
because he left college in his third year, and that the lack of 
certain quahties in his writing can be traced pretty directly 
to this lack of "preliminary intellectual drill" — as if good 
old Yale or any other American college ever helped a man of 
genius to write! The preliminary intellectual drill which 
men of letters need, which some men get while they happen 
to be in college and some men get when they happen not to 
be in college, is not the sort which our beloved universities 
have shown themselves competent to administer. 

We do not know why Cooper did not learn to write better. 
There is that in his style which suggests that he was con- 
genitally tone-deaf, and that even a course in a theological 
seminary could not have cured his constitutional defects. We 
do know that after he was dismissed from Yale he went into 
the merchant marine and the navy and found matter for 
stories, good, honest, yo-heave-ho and belay-there stories. 
And we know too, we who have passed irrevocably into the 
sad daylight of culture, which, as Emerson says, instantly 
impairs the chiefest beauty of spontaneousness — we know 
that Cooper is not a great artist; he is wholly satisfactory only 
to those who have no ear for style, who are indifferent to 
consistency of character, who do not care how the "dry twig" 
got there, so that somebody steps on it at a ticklish moment. 



COOPER 41 

It is not as though Cooper were a teller of naive, unvarnished 
tales; such tales please the most fastidious mind. His fault 
is that he has coated his stories with a sticky, tacky varnish 
of ugly hue. To deny this is not only to misunderstand his 
merit, the great power that overcomes his own dead weight 
of words, but to misconceive the pleasure that millions of 
readers find in him. It is unjust to ascribe to a classic 
virtues to which it has no claim. Cooper is an outdoor man. 
Critics have shut him up in their studies with books about 
rhetoric and style and other things of limited interest. Mark 
Twain opened the study windows and let in some fresh air. 
But he did not stop with this revivifying service; he jumped 
in through the window and stamped on the critics. And 
all the while Cooper was out in the woods. 

Cooper gave to fiction some wholly new material, primeval 
as the forest, native and sincere. He knew the woods and 
he knew the sea. He knew Indians objectively, their ap- 
pearance and habits of action. Their habits of mind, about 
which we know nothing, he probably did not understand, 
because he did not understand the characters of white men 
and women. The ladies in "The Pilot" are intolerable, 
much worse than Dickens's Dora and Agnes. But when the 
mysterious stranger begins to handle the ship, how she sails! 

Cooper did not like people any too heartily. Perhaps it 
is not unduly fanciful to see a connection between his failure 
to understand his characters and the stupidity that allowed 
him, a prosperous and honoured man, to make himself and 
his neighbours miserable through years of quarrel. 

Human nature was not his province; when he tried to sail 



42 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

in it he was as a landlubber; when he tried to strike through 
it on foot, he was as a greenhorn in the woods to whom 
Natty Bumppo might deliver patronizing lectures. Cooper 
loves open air nature heartily, honestly, and he manages to 
impart his enthusiasm through his heavy ineptitudes of ex- 
pression. His Indians are part of nature, like the wild 
animals; we accept them, we do not know enough about 
them to question their "psychology." 

It is a tribute to Cooper that no American since his time, 
for all our real or pretended gains in ethnological knowledge, 
has made any better Indians. Of late years western stories 
have recorded the contact of our civilization with the rem- 
nants of the better tribes of red men whom we have de- 
bauched and cheated, and with the dirty, unheroic savages 
of the plains. But few of the later writers seem to have been 
really fond of the Indians, to have drawn them as convincing 
heroes or interesting villains. 

Men who go north and meet the woods Indian still un- 
spoiled (I am thinking especially of one sympathetic and 
shrewd explorer) tell us that they find the living brother of 
Cooper's bronze hero, dignified, of high honour, stoical and 
eloquent. Cooper's red heroes are at least as convincing as 
many of the paleface heroes of romance whom we accept. 
Uncas and Chingachgook will bear scrutiny as well as Rob 
Roy and Robin Hood. It is with them, the figures of myth, 
that Natty Bumppo belongs; he is not an American character 
but a fabulous personage, like Ulysses, Achilles, King Arthur, 
and the adorable pirates of Howard Pyle and Stevenson. He 
has taken his place in this gallery of demigods and held it 



COOPER 43 

for a century. There he seems likely to remain until we close 
the institution forever and the innocent credulity which is 
the postulate of romance shall become an atrophied function 
in man. 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

James Fenimore Cooper was born in Burlington, New 
Jersey, September 15, 1789; he died at Cooperstown, New 
York, September 14, 1851. Cooperstown was settled by his 
father, who owned a large tract of land there. In Cooper's 
boyhood it was wilderness, and "The Pioneers" is a picture 
of the country. He went to Yale College, but was dismissed 
for a misdemeanour in his third year. Then he entered the 
merchant service for a year, after which he enlisted in the 
navy and served as midshipman four years. He married, 
resigned from the navy, and became a gentleman farmer, first 
on Long Island, then at Cooperstown. He went to England 
in 1826, returned to America in 1833. He wrote three books 
to attack monarchy and uphold republicanism, two books 
to attack the vices of his countrymen, and three books to 
uphold the landlords in their fight with settlers; he was one 
of the landlords. His controversies made the most widely 
read author the most unpopular man in America. He was 
an honest fighter and showed in his life some of the quahties 
and defects of his books. 

His works are: Precaution, 1820; The Spy, 1821; The 
Pioneers, 1823; The Pilot, 1823; Lionel Lincoln, 1823-1824; 
The Last of the Mohicans, 1826; the Prairie, 1827; The Red 
Rover, 1828; Notions of the Americans, 1828; The Wept of 



44 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

the Wish-ton-wish, 1829; The Water Witch, 1830; The 
Bravo, 1831; The Heidenmauer, 1832; The Headsman, 1833 
The Monikins, 1835; Sketches of Switzerland, 1835; Glean- 
ings in Europe (France, 1837; England, 1837; Italy, 1838) 
The American Democrat, 1838; The Chronicles of Coopers 
town, 1838; Homeward Bound, 1838; Home as Found, 1838 
History of the Navy of the United States, 1839; The Path- 
finder, 1840; Mercedes of Castile, 1840; The Deerslayer, 1841 
The Two Admirals, 1842; Wing-and-Wing, 1842; Wyandotte 
1843; Ned Myers, 1843; Afloat and Ashore, 1844; Satanstoe 
1845; The Chainbearer, 1845; Lives of Distinguished Naval 
Officers, 1846; The Redskins, 1846; The Crater, 1847; Jack 
Tier, 1848; The Oak Openings, 1848; The Sea Lions, 1849; 
The Ways of the Hour, 1850. 

I know of no good essay on Cooper, except that on his 
"Literary Offenses" by Mark Twain, which is amusing and 
is a suggestive discourse on the art of fiction; but it should be 
taken with a grain of sugar. Professor Lounsbury 's " Life " in 
American Men of Letters is conscientious. 



CHAPTER IV 
EMERSON 

Some thinkers are so candid and so wise in formulating their 
relations in life, that they become the best critics of them- 
selves and their generation. What a man a hundred years 
later may say of them is truest when it is but a slight revision 
of their own account of their personal destinies and surround- 
ings. Emerson is one of these completely self-expressed 
recorders of life. Did any one else ever more thoroughly obey 
the Socratic injunction.? Emerson epitomizes his era and his 
neighbourhood. His mind is open to the prevailing winds 
of thought from all quarters. As he says of Swedenborg, 
he lies abroad upon his times; his significance absorbs a 
multitude of lesser men; his eminence grows more imposing 
as the ephemeral which was his daily partner sinks out of 
sight. In his later years he made some "Historic Notes of 
Life and Letters in New England," to which one has but 
to add for him ^'qiurrum pars maxima fuit," in order to make 
it the best possible introduction to his life and writings. 

"The key to the period" — the period of his young man- 
hood — "appeared to be," he says, "that the mind had be- 
come aware of itself." After Kant those who pursued 
philosophy analyzed their instrument of thought, scrutinized 
with a mixture of credulous wonder and scepticism the mental 

45 



46 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

ground on which religions and philosophies are erected. 
Emerson, poet, mystic, ethical enthusiast, is an alert critic 
of his own intellectual processes, a keen judge of contem- 
porary modes of thought and of the general motives of 
human conduct. Whoever tries to account for his genius, 
to rearrange it in the intellectual landscape, to complete it 
here and depress it there by later standards and by right of 
historical knowledge, will find that Emerson has estimated 
his leading ideas and his place in a certain moment of human 
thought with astonishing insight. 

The chapter on "Idealism" in "Nature" is a compact and 
lucid summary of the type of philosophy then prevalent; you 
will look in vain for a better statement of it in any latter-day 
history of philosophic development. Emerson's "Lecture on 
the Times," read when he was thirty-eight years old, and his 
lecture on the "New England Reformers," delivered three 
years later, place local events and ideas then dominant in 
the position that they occupy as seen from our perspective. 
His intellectual horizon often seems to be at the same distance 
from him as from us. Much that we would say of him he has 
said of the forces that influenced him and included him. 

Between Emerson's time and ours intervenes a revolution 
that came to its crisis about the year 1860, the complete 
triumph of the scientific spirit in all minds that are abreast 
of their age and in fullest possession of current culture. This 
revolution has entirely reordered philosophic and economic 
theory and has made transcendental idealism as obsolete as 
scholastic theology — though, to be sure, there are multitudes 
of men who still live in antique faiths and ignore the forefront 



EMERSON 47 

of human thought. To see Emerson clearly we must pass 
back through this revolution and emerge on his side of it; 
without that act of the historical imagination we shall mis- 
understand our differences from him. 

Before Emerson's time Kant's laborious and honest Kritik, 
based on the revolutionary rationalism of Hume, had laid 
the foundations for a scientific study of mind. But the world 
was not ready to carry its implications out to their discon- 
certing conclusion, which is the destruction of religious and 
philosophic myth. In a sense Kant himself was not ready; 
he hedged a little, and his followers hedged still more. The 
age was romantic, and philosophy had to make concessions 
to religion. In the solid structure which Kant so cautiously 
and courageously erected, he left a breach opened toward 
vague imknowables. Ethical and political philosophy, called 
upon by the practical powers of Church and State to assume 
some of the intellectual police functions which liberalism had 
wrested from religion, entered through the breach and took 
the Kantian stronghold. Post- Kantian philosophy became a 
wonder-wander world of conventional ethics in poetic motley 
and learned garb, a solemn masquerade in which kaiser, pope, 
banker, and landlord were honoured guests. An unknowable 
Absolute and the Christian deity merged in a god too indis- 
tinct for any one to be sceptical about and too impersonal 
to be held responsible for the world of fact. 

The world of fact was a very dismal place. Emerson, 
confirmed optimist, describes it with a bold hostility that no 
recent indictment could exceed. "In the law courts," he 
says, "crimes of fraud have taken the place of crimes of force. 



48 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

The stockholder has stepped into the place of the warlike 
baron. The nobles shall not any longer, as feudal lords, have 
power of life and death over the churls, but now in another 
shape as capitalists, shall in all love and peace eat them up as 
before. Nay, government itself becomes the resort of those 
whom government was invented to restrain." 

In Boston, where Emerson is now a respectable local hero, 
the barons are stronger than ever, and their vassals, disguised 
as State Militia, are defending the Castle of Seven-per-Cent. 
in the name of government, law and order. Emerson had 
remarkable flashes of insight into the motives of a social 
period which has not yet terminated. His way of saying 
what he saw was seldom so plain as the foregoing passage; 
it usually took a symbolic metaphorical shape. " Things are 
in the saddle and ride mankind." In England and America, 
conservatism, that is, the interests of those in comfortable 
circumstances of property, was in complete control. "Its 
fingers clutch the fact," says Emerson, " and it will not open 
its eyes to see a better fact." Commercial authority permit- 
ted liberalism and humanitarianism so long as they did not 
threaten to upset the existing regime of plutonic tyranny. 
Authority encouraged philosophy so long as philosophy re- 
mained too difficult or too unworldly to be dangerous. In 
Germany the philosopher was taught to utter discreetly and 
in innocuously abstract terms any conclusion of his meta- 
physic which might seem to question the authority of king 
and priest. It was Hegel's glorification of monarchy, the 
friendliness to political reaction which is inherent in his 
philosophy, that made him in due time the official voice of 



EMERSON 49 

Prussian wisdom. In France the failure of the Revolution 
and the monstrous Napoleonic drama had left thought de- 
pressed, cynical and factional. In New England the austerity 
of Puritan ethics was a cloak for commercial trickery which 
even our brutal times cannot regard with moral satisfaction, 
and which we have therefore agreed, out of timid tenderness 
for old families, to forget or deny. The Boston merchant was 
a strong supporter of slavery; radical philosophy was either 
impotent or insincere; and education, nominally popular,* 
was in the hands of ministers, lawyers and the well-to-do. 
In "The American Scholar," which tells what education ought 
to be, Emerson has revealed the poverty and narrowness of 
the schools of his time; and in the lecture called "The Con- 
servative" he has summed up with marvellous power the 
influence of commercial interest upon thought : 

"The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and 
his social frame is a hospital; his total legislation is for the 
present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib 
and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea. Sickness gets 
organized as well as health, and vice as well as virtue. Now 
that a vicious system of trade has existed so long, it has 
stereotyped itself in the human generation, and misers are 
born. And now that sickness has got such a foothold, leprosy 
has grown cunning, has got into the ballot-box; the lepers 
outvote the clean; society has resolved itself into a Hospital 
Committee, and all its laws are quarantine. If any man re- 
sist and set up a foolish hope he has entertained as good 
against the general despair. Society frowns on him, shuts him 
out of her opportunities, her granaries, her refectories, her 



50 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

water and bread, and will serve him a sexton's turn. Con- 
servatism takes as low a view of every part of human action 
and passion. Its religion is just as bad; a lozenge for the sick; 
a dolorous tune to beguile the distemper; mitigations of pain 
by pillows and remedies; pardons for sin, funeral honours — 
never self-help, renovation and virtue. Its social and polit- 
ical action has no better aim; to keep out wind and weather, 
to bring the week and the year about, and make the world 
last our day; not to sit on the world and steer it; not to sink 
the memory of the past in the glory of a new and more excel- 
lent creation; a timid cobbler and patcher, it degrades what- 
ever it touches. The cause of education is urged in this 
country with the utmost earnestness — on what ground? 
Why on this, that the people have the power, and if they are 
not instructed to sympathize with the intelligent, reading, 
trading, and governing class, inspired with a taste for the same 
competitions and prizes, they will upset the fair pageant of 
Judicature, and perhaps lay a hand on the sacred muniments 
of wealth itself, and new-distribute the land. Religion is 
taught in the same spirit. The contractors who were 
building a road out of Baltimore, some years ago, found the 
Irish labourers quarrelsome and refractory to a degree that 
embarrassed the agents and seriously interrupted the prog- 
ress of the work. The corporation were advised to call off 
the police and build a Catholic chapel, which they did; the 
priest presently restored order, and the work went on pros- 
perously. Such hints, be sure, are too valuable to be lost. 
If you do not value the Sabbath, or other religious institu- 
tions, give yourself no concern about maintaining them. 



EMERSON 51 

They have already acquired a market value as conservators 
of property; and if priest and church-member should fail, 
the chambers of commerce and the presidents of the banks, 
the very innholders and landlords of the county, would 
muster with fury to their support." 

By Emerson's time a few thinkers in America and else- 
where had discovered that the high phrases of the American 
Revolution had been but catch-words to enlist the support 
of the people in a war to transfer the ownership of America 
from British landlords and traders to American landlords and 
traders; school, church, and politics conspired to keep the 
people worshipping mythically noble forefathers and cheering 
loudly for the shadow of rights whose substance they had 
never embraced. 

From these conditions philosophy and such reUgious aspi- 
ration as had broken free from the oldest conventions took 
refuge in an idealistic account of life which left much of life 
out and created for itself a stronghold amid the clouds. The 
romantic spirit absorbed the best minds of the time, for only 
in romance was man free or at least unconscious of his chains. 
Most of the eloquent expression of the day in England and 
America and Germany is wholly in romantic terms. At the 
opening of the nineteenth century Fichte, a romantic in 
scientific guise, was the leading figure in German philosophy. 
Hegelism was to follow but was not yet ripe for its holy 
Metternichian alliances with the Kaiser and the Fatherland 
(that is, banker and landlord) against the revolutionary 
spirit. 

Fichte had had his quarrels with the clergy and had been 



52 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

routed from his position in the University of Jena. In 
Berhn he joined the Uterary romantics, toned down his 
atheism, and by his patriotic eloquence at the time of the 
Napoleonic invasion he became a national hero; thus this 
ethical idealism achieved popularity. It was carried to Eng- 
land by Coleridge and Carlyle, and came to America by way 
of Carlyle's writings and James Marsh's American edition 
of Coleridge's "Aids to Reflection." These works are not pure 
Fichtean, but a medley of various German post-Kantians. 
In them, however, Fichte is dominant, and his influence is 
the most clearly discernible of the various philosophies that 
underlie New England Transcendentalism and the work of 
Emerson. 

In the sentimentally ethical universe which it pleased 
Fichte to create, high souls could escape from the world of 
fact and find at least two yearnings of human nature well 
satisfied, the desire to contemplate the universe as an aesthet- 
ically admirable whole and the heroic wish to be held morally 
responsible. This ethical and aesthetic transcendentalism 
drew up into itself the moral enthusiasms of the leading 
imaginations; though they now and again descended to the 
earth to attack a specific abuse like black slavery they 
were in the main aloof, serenely self-centred and ineffectual. 
They were wont, as Emerson said of them (and in his letters 
to Carlyle he frankly and with sadly smiling regret includes 
himself among the fruitless flowers of speculation) — they 
were wont to make severe moral demands on every one and 
yet were not good fighters in the common battles of life. 

Every philosopher's beliefs are in part a construction of his 



EMERSON 53 

own temperament; he assimilates current ideas and is the 
product of his time, but he selects from what is about him 
the thing that most fits his nature. Emerson could not have 
composed a lifeless philosophy even from the most inhuman 
development of post-Kantian metaphysics. He had little 
sympathy, in his most vigorous moments, with such a view 
as a British Hegelian expresses, that the special work of 
philosophy "is to comprehend the world, not to try to make 
it better." It is, however, significant, perhaps fortunate, 
that the kind of idealism which came to him and his neigh- 
bours most powerfully, reinforced by the early health of 
Carlyle's ethical intensity, was the moral universe of Fichte. 
According to this philosophy the real world is a limitless 
arena in which the soul can realize its duties by conflict. 
Struggle is the source of morality. Virtue means good action, 
the overcoming of something in external nature or human 
nature. Duty is the only true thing in the world of phenom- 
ena. Emerson's phrase reflecting this idea is "the sovereignty 
oi ethics." Things are what we ought to make them, and 
tliat is the only sense in which they really exist. Such is 
Fichte's simplest message, and it is central in Emerson's 
thought, whether or not he knew or cared for Fichte's com- 
plete works. The idea was in the air and it was so well 
adapted to Emerson's genius that it shows no more signs 
of having been transplanted from alien soils than the New 
England apple. 

For Emerson philosophy retained its old meaning, love of 
wisdom. If it have no influence on conduct it is worthless; 
if it have a bad influence on conduct it is bad philosophy. 



64 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

He treats academic metaphysicians with mild irony: "Who 
has not looked into a metaphysical book, but what sensible 
man ever looked twice?" "Ask what is best in our experi- 
ence, and we shall say a few pieces of plain dealing with wise 
people. Our conversation once and again has apprised us 
that we belong to better circles than we have yet beheld; that 
a mental power invites us whose generalizations are more 
worth for joy and effect than anything that is now called 
philosophy or literature." That phrase holds his own value. 
His generalizations are more worth for joy and effect than 
much that is now called philosophy and literature. Matthew 
Arnold tells us that Emerson is a great teacher of life but 
not a great man of letters, and not a philosopher because he 
made no system. These distinctions are clear and just if we 
grant the definitions of the terms used. But Emerson, like 
every man of genius, strains academic definitions; and in- 
stead of holding to their tarnished uses, we find that to learn 
what he is demands a new understanding of terms, that 
academic corrosions must be scoured off and the true colour 
of the metal revealed. 

What is philosophy.'* At the present time it seems to 
be the study of dead men's thoughts, pursued by small 
groups of teachers (in those institutions which, Emerson held, 
are "ludicrously" called universities), and not participated in 
to any great extent except by students who intend in turn 
to become teachers. But what historically is philosophy.? 
The answer may be found in a posthumous book by William 
James (a true successor of Emerson in that he also was a 
lover of wisdom in the old humane sense, and relieved us of 



EMERSON 55 

much accumulated metaphysic by athletically pitching it 
out the window): "A view of anything is termed philo- 
sophic just in proportion as it is broad and connected with 
other views, and as it uses principles not proximate or inter- 
mediate but ultimate and all embracing, to justify itself. 
Any very sweeping view of the world is a philosophy in this 
sense ... an intellectualized attitude toward life. Pro- 
fessor Dewey well describes the constitution of all the philos- 
ophies that actually exist when he says that philosophy 
expresses a certain attitude, purpose, and temper of conjoined 
will and intellect, rather than a discipline whose boundaries 
can be neatly marked off." 

In a German liistoric handbook of philosophy we find 
much space given to Xenophanes, a satirist, a Greek Alex- 
ander Pope, and much space given to Parmenides, a didactic 
poet. These amateur thinkers of an elder age hold a place 
in philosophy; but the poetic preacher who wrote "The 
Conduct of Life" is a footnote person in the same handbook. 
Jonathan Edwards, who erected his superstitions into a 
magnitudinous if not an architectural pile, is an admitted 
philosopher; but Emerson whose essay on "Fate" is ahve 
and inspiring after half a century of disputation on the free- 
will puzzle, is but reluctantly acknowledged as a philosopher. 
In the official rolls of learning, then, a poetic fragment that 
is very old and not read by anybody but professors is philos- 
ophy; and a system, though it be a tissue of superstition and 
bad reasoning, especially if it be written obscurely, is philos- 
ophy: but a modern poetic preacher, whose writings are 
drenched with philosophy and whose philosophy has secured 



56 THE SPmiT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

a vicarious immortality by its allegiance with literary beauty, 
is not entitled to the mystic degree. The hall of philosophy 
at Harvard is named after Emerson, and that is a good sign. 
Perhaps the words of "The American Scholar" may in time 
be understood even in Cambridge. 

Emerson is one of the few men in the nineteenth century 
whose discourses on philosophic subjects remain inspiring 
through many changes of belief; moreover it is Emerson who, 
with Goethe and Carlyle, distilled the quintessential value of 
so me modes of Greek and German thought which in their orig- 
inal system have fallen to the ground. He was a humanist. 
He restored philosophy to the uses of life. He borrowed 
Plato from the schoolmen long enough to prove that Socrates 
was a human being. Emerson's failure to systematize may 
be due in part to his sane perception that system does not 
ensure truth, that this perplexing world will not contract 
itself and comfortably revolve within the geometric sphere 
of any logical scheme of thought. Emerson is like Plato, 
whose dialogues, though they may be systematized by critics, 
are not in themselves systematic, but are conversational and 
suggestive discourses. This modern lyceum lecturer talks 
about one broad general subject at a time, fills each theme 
with compressed (but not dried) matter drawn from all 
manner of sources, leaves his auditor with the net results 
of many philosophies, and passes on without a formal con- 
clusion. Like Bacon he is an all-inquiring tourist in the 
region of other minds. He reads for his private uses and is 
far from what he calls a sycophantic and mendicant reader. 

It is because he dips from so many streams of thought. 



EMERSON 57 

because he condenses an essay into a paragraph and then 
inserts the paragraph into any theme that will hold it con- 
veniently, that he is charged with being disconnected and 
deficient in organic structure. The truth is, his work is 
singularly unified, not only section for section, essay for 
essay, but regarded as a whole from his first lecture to his last. 
Matter so homogeneous as his may break up into globules 
like spilt mercury, but only contact is required to make 
instant adherence and fluid reassemblage. For forty years 
he preached the same sermon — character, conduct, spiritual 
energy, courageous will, resilient belief and confident illusion. 
Erroneous vitality is better than dead accuracy. "We 
have a certain instinct that where there is a great amount 
of life, though gross and peccant, it has its own checks and 
purifications, and will be found at last in harmony with 
moral laws." 

His laudation of the will to live is a reaction against the 
old theological idea that will is a deplorable fact, that it is 
the cause of the individual's sinful unfitness in a universe 
perfect except for the unique vileness of man and so the ex- 
planation (which does not explain) of our inharmoniousness 
with an omniscient and beneficent god. Seen in the light 
of the philosophies that developed after him, Emerson, a 
gentle country parson, is not unlike a Nietzsche to the Cal- 
vanistic Schopenhauers. But necessarily the terms in which 
he expresses his revolt against the degrading humilities and 
soul sickness of theology are the terms of the religion which 
he has outgrown. "In spite of our imbecility and terror and 
*the universal decay of religion, etc. etc' the moral sense re- 



58 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

appears to-day with the same morning newness that has been 
from of old the fountain of beauty and strength." The 
source and master of the universe is still the God of Jacob, 
a force for righteousness fighting on our side of the battle, 
though he appears under the frigidly impersonal designation : 
"Oversoul." 

Emerson falls into confusions of thought; his incurable 
optimism simply cannot dispose of the problem of evil; yet 
these failings are only the inherent weakness of the entire 
idealistic philosophy of his time and of the revised Christi- 
anity known as Unitarianism. None of the orderly exponents 
of idealistic monism ever got round the stump of vice and 
misery. Evil is the germ of decay which eats through all 
their systems. The main difference between Emerson's 
confession of faith and the elaborate reasonings of Spinoza, 
of Fichte, of Hegel, is that they, creating and defending 
systems which pretend to completeness, must explain in- 
consistencies away, whereas Emerson blandly accepts in- 
consistencies. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of 
little minds, adored by little statesmen, and philosophers and 
divines." The greater inconsistencies, too terrible to be 
foolish^ Emerson ignores. "Omit the negative propositions," 
he says — an injunction which is abhorrent to an honest, 
intrepid mind, and which, of course, he vigorously disobeyed 
himself! It is doubtful if he compared his essay on "Fate" 
with his chapter on "Idealism," pared them down to their 
issues so that their essential contradiction might be seen. 

"Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole 
circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country 



EMERSON 59 

and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, 
in an aged creeping past, but as one vast picture which God 
paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the 
soul." And in the essay on " Worship " he says : " Strong men 
believe in cause and effect. The man was born to do it, and 
his father was born to be the father of him and of his deed; 
and by looking narrowly you shall see there was no luck in 
the matter; but it was all a problem in arithmetic or an experi- 
ment in chemistry. The curve of the flight of the moth is 
preordained, and all things go by number, rule and weight." 

An entire everlastingly finished universe, painted once for 
all on eternity, precludes the possibility that man can will 
anything or introduce a particle of novelty into the world 
by desiring one thing more than another. Yet the essay on 
"Fate" is a bold problem-cutting declaration that the world 
is continuously remaking, that the human will, however 
small, is the very treasure of life, "gallantly contending 
against the universe of chemistry"; and the eloquent perora- 
tion addressed to Blessed Unity and Beautiful Necessity 
magnificently begs the question. The Emersonian paradoxes: 
"Fate has its lord, limitation its limits," "Power attends and 
antagonizes Fate," "the hero masters destiny by believing in 
it; " "Fate involves melioration" — these are no verbal quips, 
but a sincere account of the matter; for the matter itself, the 
Free-will-determinism problem, is a paradox foisted on life by 
technical philosophy and by the baseless dogmas of rehgion. 

Emerson is inconsistent because life is inconsistent, and a 
fair attempt to describe it from one point of observation, 
assumed to-day, will challenge to-morrow's statement of 



60 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

another aspect. The discipHnes of hfe instruct us that 
"good thoughts are no better than good dreams unless they 
be executed." Yet the end of the essay on "Success," a 
sermon to chide hasty activity and that spirit in American 
life which is condensed in the abominable motto, "Do it 
now," concludes with this approval of the static contempla- 
tive ideal: "The inner life sits at home, and does not learn 
to do things nor value these facts at all. 'Tis a quiet, wise 
perception. It loves truth because it is itself real; it loves 
right, it knows nothing else; but it makes no progress . . . 
it lies in the sun and broods on the world." Emerson does 
not say that this is the only good ideal, but he phrases it 
strongly enough to show that there, for the day, for the pur- 
poses of that essay, his heart is at home. 

Emerson gives the antidote to each moral or immoral over- 
dose; his inconsistencies show violently when single sentences 
are confronted with other sentences from distant parts of his 
work. Inherently he is as consistent as the human being 
ever is who tries to tell how God made the world and is 
managing it at the present diflScult hour. Emerson would 
have us grasp the metaphysical nettle and rob it of its sting. 
It is life we are bent on, not problems. Whatever the ulti- 
mate constitution of the world, we know what plain human 
virtues are necessary to go bravely and profitably through 
life. We cannot dispel evil by wishing it away, a^ Emerson 
seems to say in some of his healthful, high-noon wedcings with 
the sun, but we can see what may be made of evil, how much 
of it may be disregarded, evaded and overcome. This page 
from Emerson and Carlyle and Fichte was written centuries 



EMERSON 61 

ago by Epictetus. We can try our muscles on evil and tun. 
it to account, thus realizing and reaffirming the law of com- 
pensation. 

Christianity preaches original sin; Emerson, like the Uni- 
tarians, preaches original virtue. His serene manner of 
reversing some of the facts of life so that they all face one 
way is, at some moments, irritating, but in the end and on the 
whole it is exhilarating. It is a poetic emotional way of read- 
ing life; it is Browning's way and is wholly satisfactory in 
him until overzealous admirers try to make a philosopher of 
him and reduce his thoughts to prose, thereby killing the 
poetry. Emerson is a prose rhapsodist and psalmist; and 
though he is never quite free from the atmosphere of lyceum 
platform and pulpit, though he uses the vocabulary of theol- 
ogy and philosophy, he is impatient of argument and sits 
augustly above the planes of logic. This would justly exclude 
him from the company of philosophers, but for one thing: 
the philosophers themselves are not logical, and they play 
fast and loose with facts. 

In the chapter called "Considerations by the Way" in 
"The Conduct of Life," Emerson says: "In front of these 
sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil.'* 
Then follow three pages of historic illustration, in which 
events are so simply, so cheaply, motived, that one knows 
that history was not made in any such story-book fa.shion. 
But as Emerson says of the old physicians, the " meaning holds 
if the physiology is a little mythical. * ' He often carries his points 
in a high-handed manner. If any illustration be not grounded 
in reality, he will cordially yield it and proceed undismayed. 



62 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

We know from the memoirs of his contemporaries that 
Emerson's personality carried authority, that even when they 
did not fully understand him his audiences followed him be- 
cause his character fascinated them and persuaded them to 
believe him. With his death a magic passed from his work 
which the modern reader cannot recall. Certainly he was 
one of those to be included in Hazhtt's list of persons one 
would wish to have seen. Those who heard him felt the 
ennobling spell of his presence; the more vigorous Carlyle 
bowed his head for once and acknowledged a superior. More- 
over, the audiences of those days heard from Emerson many 
witty and colloquial asides which do not appear in his writ- 
ings and which mitigated the continuously lofty tone and 
fetched him back from a starry aloofness. "I do not," he 
says, "often speak to public questions; they are odious and 
hurtful and it seems like meddling and leaving your work. I 
have my own spirits in prison; spirits in deeper prisons, whom 
no man visits if I do not." But he did speak to good purpose 
on public questions; and his asides, reported by those who 
heard him, and his letters reveal the practical shrewd Yankee 
In him, a man among his neighbours as well as a preacher 
from the hilltop. 

His high thinking sometimes loses itself in the skies as when 
he says: "There are moments when the affections rule and 
absorb a man and make his happiness dependent on a person 
or persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again — 
its overarching vault bright with the galaxies of immutable 
lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us as 
clouds must lose their finite character and blend with God, 



EMERSON 63 

to attain their own perfection." The seer who lives at ease 
in such astronomical heights wrote to a friend: "Everything 
wakes this morning except my darling boy." And he wrote 
to Carlyle of the farmers, traditionally the honest backbone 
of the country: "Horace Greeley does their thinking for 
them at a dollar a head." Emerson walked on the roads of 
a New England town and read the daily newspapers. 

Sanctified airs he abominated, and he must have discon- 
certed some rapt admirers who approached him in adoring 
mood, by his whimsical air-clearing good sense. He was re- 
served but not timid. He was not afraid "to write things 
down coarsely as they stand." The vigour of Emerson's at- 
tacks on plain daily political hypocrisy and commercial cor- 
ruption is doubled by the habitual serenity of the man. A 
saint on fire is a more persuasive attorney for the prosecution 
than the chronic objector. The haloed Emerson has been well 
respected and remembered, but the citizen Emerson has been 
obscured by the light of the aureole. To read him in his 
entirety, his letters and journals and the reports of his real as 
well as his professional "conversations," is to be become ac- 
quainted with a very great specimen of the human race. Just 
to hint the flaw which is necessary to a convincing portrait, 
one may object gently to his blowing hot and cold on Whit- 
man; he did not quite stand to the guns of his first convic- 
tion that Whitman was at the beginning of "a great career," 
and his annoyance at Whitman's use in good faith of his 
emphatic words of approval was quite natural and human. 
The rest of us common mortals would have been more an- 
noyed, and we should not have had the brains to see Whit- 



64 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

man's merits at once, as Emerson saw them without waiting 
for other people to point them out. 

Emerson is one of the few great preachers who do not stand 
small in their pulpits and who do not lay their greatness aside 
in the robing-room after the service. His gracious and sub- 
stantial character is behind his sermons. Arnold, Carlyle, 
Ruskin have faults that repel the congregation even though 
it comes willingly to the next discourse. Arnold's intel- 
lectual snobbery, Carlyle's raucous ill-temper and his falsifi- 
cation of verifiable matters of fact, Ruskin's querulous 
superiority, his prolix over-explanatory patronage of us 
naughty little schoolboys — these faults no fault of Emerson's 
resembles or equals. He preached culture. Like Goethe 
he was culture. He impels us to lofty thinking by exemplify- 
ing it in our presence; whereas Arnold's insistence on culture 
(itself a "droning preponderance" such as Emerson thought 
true culture should modulate) makes a healthy man yearn 
to commit some gross vulgarity. Arnold, who will lead us 
to the excellence of Homer, spends half his time laying a 
ferule on Homer's translators and biographers, so that one 
wearies of the school-room smell and longs for the shining 
strand before Troy. Carlyle, who will improve his country, 
assassinates it. "England," he says, "is dying of inanition." 
It obstinately refuses to die but reveals a quite unphilosophic 
will to survive its grave diseases and justify Emerson's buoy- 
ant prediction: "Let who will fail, England will not." If 
Emerson has a deaf spot in his ear and can be guilty of a puz- 
zling stupidity when he says, "France where poet never grew," 
at least he does not wipe France from the map of Europe, 



EMERSON 65 

but writes a hearty essay on Montaigne. Emerson glorifies 
religion because it is a natural and beautiful function of 
humanity to worship excellence. Carlyle hurls religion at 
us because we are miserable fools that need to be policed, and 
so we quite cheerfully fling it back. Ruskin, a theologian 
at heart and by the insuperable tradition of his youthful 
discipline, must be always haranguing us into obedience to 
himself and other lofty persons; he warns us, when we would 
be free from superstitions and miseries, that the fly on the 
ceiling is the perfect embodiment of freedom. Though Emer- 
son has no delusions about the multitude, and though in one 
place he talks like a Malthusian and an aristocrat* he is not 
long in this mood. 

He sees the onward unconquerable process of life. Man 
"like a wounded oyster mends his shell with pearl." He 
regenerates from within, because the life in him urges him 
to keep on, and the knocks he gets show him how to live 
better, and not, as Ruskin seems to think, and as the priestly 
mind ever teaches, because man has high ideas thrust down 
on him from upper circles. 

Emerson is with the stream of American life and the 



*" Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, 
lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be 
flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to 
tame, drill, divide and break them up and draw individuals out of them. 
The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth 
preserving. Masses! The calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass 
at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet accomplished women only, and no 
shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers and laz- 
zaroni at all. If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not 
multiply the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man 
that is born will be hailed as essential." Conduct of Life, p. 237. Shade of 
Nietzsche attend! 



66 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

thought of the world, not against it. He condemns errors and 
calls them by plain univocal names, but he does not sneer at 
them. He is more hopeful and undaunted than the very 
American spirit whose pitiful shallow successes he shows to 
be worthless. The remedy for bad men is good men. The 
cure for false theology is not new theology, but mother-wit. 
Life need not go Emerson's way nor heed his explicit direc- 
tions. It will come out somehow to a good end by the 
unfolding of its own nature. He does not, like egotistic 
preachers, bear the weight of this world and shake a disap- 
pointed head when humanity fails to obey orders. "I have 
no infirmity of faith," he says, "no belief that it is of much 
importance what I or any man may say; I am sure that a 
certain truth will be said through me, though I should be 
dumb, or though I should try to say the reverse." He 
believes that the right leaders inevitably lead, though the 
apparently dominant legislator and money-changer are 
corrupt and are competent only in their own interests. 
"Society is a troop of thinkers, and the best heads among 
them take the best places." This, to be sure, is not true of 
any visibly present congress or university, but it is not untrue 
when the already lived ages of man are summed up. Emer- 
son represents an era of excessive individualism, and his own 
emphasis on the single private man is extreme, but this is not 
the "inflamed individualism" which, he says, puts a man 
out of sympathy with his fellows. He seems sometimes not 
to understand the organic growth of society. His chapter on 
" Wealth" is sciolistic. In such matters Carlyle goes deeper. 
Emerson ascribes English prosperity and peacefulness to the 



EMERSON 67 

national habit of "considering that every man must take care 
of himself and has himself to thank if he do not maintain 
and improve his position in society" — a view of life, if, 
indeed, Englishmen have it more than other nations, which 
financial alliances and industrial agglomerations were even 
in those days proving untrue to fact, 

Emerson's doctrine of self-reliance is tonic to the soul, it 
stirs a man to straighten up and make the best of himself. 
But it is blind to the mutual dependence of the parts of the 
social organism. "Heaven," he says, "deals with us on no 
representative principles; souls are not saved in bundles" — 
a survival in Emerson of the old doctrine of Christianity. 
The world was learning even then that we live and die 
physically and morally in bundles, and that though our 
"whole use of wealth needs revision and reform," yet that 
reform is not in the direction of an other-worldly and individ- 
ualist view of it. Though wealth does not make the home, 
poverty often makes the home impossible. It is a fine fancy 
to say that he who owns the day is rich, and perhaps the man 
who asks to have enough of material comforts asks too much, 
as Emerson says, yet the demand continues, mounts increas- 
,ingly, and must be answered if we are to come out of that 

/ state of society which he regards as barbarous into the state 
where "every industrious man can get his living without 
dishonest customs." 

\ Emerson is confessedly not a practical social reformer; he 
sometimes seems to regard with a too dispassionate fortitude 
the agonies and tumults of hfe. He stands in sceptical 
sympathy aside from most of the "movements" with which 



68 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Concord was seething, "The superior mind," he says in the 
essay on Montaigne, "will find itself equally at odds with the 
evils of society and with the projects that are ofiFered to 
relieve them." He addresses himself specifically to those 
forces which are in the individual if they are anywhere. He 
directs his encouraging admonitions not to collective manldnd 
but to the single man. Sometimes his consolations are rather 
too cosmic, as when he assures us that we are "part of the 
astonishing astronomy and existing at last to moral ends and 
from moral causes." For the greater part, his electric incite- 
ments to better action, his applied ethics are true and virile; 
his liberal poetic way of asserting the old doctrine of salvation 
by works rings sound through any changes of the philosophic 
climate. "The only path of escape known in all the worlds of 
God is performance." " Men talk of 'mere morality' — which 
is much as if one should say 'poor God with nobody to help 
him.' . . . Let us replace sentimentalism with realism 
and dare to uncover those simple laws, which, be they seen 
or unseen, pervade and govern." That is, never mind the 
moral metaphysic but get at the things that count in life. 
The chapter on "Worship" is an essay on the insufficiency 
of all dogmatic religions. "I see that sensible men and 
conscientious men all over the world were of one religion — 
the religion of well doing and daring, men of sturdy truth, 
men of integrity and feeling for others. My inference is 
that there is a statement of religion possible which makes all 
scepticism absurd." "Everything in natural law thunders 
the Ten Commandments." 

Emerson is always a preacher and never quite an essayist, 



EMERSON 69 

in the sense we mean when we speak of Montaigne, Lamb, 
HazUtt, and Stevenson. In his compression and compendi- 
ousness he is like Bacon. He has poetry, wit, humour, a 
genius unhke any other man's for wayward and surprising 
analogy, but his thoughts are assembled and emphasized for 
so definite a purpose that his discourses lack the apparent 
spontaneity of the true essay. It is hard to say what the true fy 

essay is, as hard as to say what a true poem is, but you know qO- 
it when you find it; and this much can be said of it, that it is 
near akin to the first-rate private letter and to private talk, 
and that the instinct of Lamb and the deliberate art of 
Stevenson both achieve it. There is somewhat the same dif- 
ference between one of Enaerson's discourses and a perfect 
essay that there is between a novel in support of a thesis or a 
parable to prove a point, and a tale that seems told for it^ own 
sake. Emerson's anthology of ideas is grouped to a homiletic 
end and is not cunningly casual as if it arranged itself. This 
implies rather more than less construction and is against the 
idea, which some people hold, that Emerson is discontinuous. 
Sometimes his thought, sailing beautifully as a cloud and 
putting the reader in a mood for more of the same poetic and 
shimmering prose, suddenly shatters on one of his sharp 
points. The abrupt erectness of some phrases, many of 
which are now familiar and therefore doubly arresting when 
we encounter them, justifies in part the notion that he is 
incoherent. This notion is enforced by the biographical 
fact that he did collect fragments and put them into pigeon- 
holes until he had enough to make an essayful. But most 
essayists write that way, if the truth were told; moreover, the 



70 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Emersonian selection is such that a kind of unity is assured in 
advance; for a fragment, even as it is pitched into a drawer, 
finds its intellectual brothers there before it. 

Pragmentariness is a defect that he knew well, and if he 
candidly found it in his own work he quite impartially and 
correctly found it in others. "Our books," he says, con- 
trasting them with Swedenborg's massive expositions, "are 
false by being fragmentary; their sentences are bon-mots and 
not parts of natural discourse." After one understands what 
Emerson is driving at, one admires the skill, conscious or 
instinctive, with which he put his lectures together; they were 
effective as spoken, and they are effective now. He is, on 
the whole, sequential; sentence follows sentence, cumulative 
and coherent, the thought selected not only to the pur- 
pose which the essay avowedly aims at but to the greater end 
which his whole life seeks. His sentences are connected 
in their subterranean structure if not in their visible rela- 
tions. 

In making notes for passages to quote in this paper, I 
found that I was turning down so many dog-ears that the 
book grew clumsy and the indicated quotations became too 
numerous to use. This in itself constitutes a criticism ci 
Emerson. One thing more that I discovered also constitutes 
a criticism of him, namely, that to pull the jewels out of his 
rnosaic, though it make the despoiler rich indeed, does disturb 
his pattern; it is a mosaic, but it is designed. He knew per- 
fectly well what he was about. He hitched his wagon of 
progress to many stars, well knowing that people would 
remember the stars. The stellar attachment has not been 



EMERSON 71 

severed by time, and if you read Emerson at all and come on a 
starry thought in any book, a good bit of Emersonian dis- 
course will trail into your mind. 

There is amazingly much in him. He gathers into one 
discourse the wisdom of twenty sages (or such of their wisdom 
as happened to appeal to him, and he was an unerring chooser), 
and he unites them to his purpose because his fundamental 
thought is unified; he embraces his subject, surrounds and 
contains it. His epigram is the true sort; its motive is 
concision, not cleverness. He is like Socrates with the inter- 
loctftor*s par f ©r the conversation left out; you silently ask 
questions and make retorts, and he answers you in the course 
of the page. He develops point upon point, apparently un- 
systematic at times, but leading to a foreseen conclusion. 
He is a master of the finest art for readers who will give their 
attention to their reading and meet a good thinker halfway, 
the art of suggestion. You must know something to read him 
and you must have had an attack of philosophy and got over 
it to understand what a great essential philosopher he is, 
despite the professional philosophers who have not recovered 
from their attack but have nursed it as a chronic state of 
mind. Walter Bagehot in "Physics and PoHtics" puts the 
matter well, and he gives a new twist to the word "culti- 
vated" that may surprise the "Philistines of culture." 

"Unproved abstract principles without number," says 
Bagehot, "have been eagerly caught up by sanguine men, and 
then carefully spun out into books and theories, which were 
to explain the whole world. But the world goes clear against 
these abstractions, and it must do so, as they require it to 



c 



72 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

go in antagonistic directions. The mass of a system attracts 
the young and impresses the unwary; but cultivated people 
(sic) are very dubious about it. They are ready to receive 
hints and suggestions, and the smallest real truth is ever wel- 
come. But a large book of deductive philosophy is much to 
be suspected. No doubt the deductions may be right; in 
most writers they are so; but where did the premises come 
from? Who is sure that they are the whole truth, and noth- 
ing but the truth, of the matter in hand? Who is not 
almost sure beforehand that they will contain a strange 
mixture of truth and error, and therefore that it will not 
be worth while to spend life in reasoning over their conse- 
quences? In a word, the superfluous energy of mankind 
has flowed over into philosophy, and has worked into 
big systems what should have been left as little sugges- 
tions." 

Emerson takes the little suggestions out of big systems 
and plants them in his prose. He "angles with himself" 
in the pools of wisdom and in his reader's sympathies. 

That statistic which it pleased Doctor Holmes to make 
and which shows that Emerson makes three tho sand refer- 
ences to over eight hundred writers, sages, and other great 
men, does not pulverize him into a Bartlett's Quotations. 
His confident mind grasps, if not the whole universe, at least 
that part of it in the disclosure of which he spent fifty years 
remeditating and rephrasing. His illustrations from current 
sciences and discoveries are often Uke Lyly's natural history, 
naive and fictitious. He uses illustration hke a poet, not 
for itself, but to place his thought picturesquely before you. 



EMERSON 73 

in the manner of the parable-maker. Many of his concrete 
examples are from every -day life; the fibrous roots of his 
analogies shoot through his native soil. He plays to and fro 
between heaven and earth, pointing to an angel behind a New 
England rock and then to a principle of mundane ethics work- 
ing out in the vast skies. His combination of the homely 
and the starry gives at once foothold and wings to the reader's 
imagination. "Slow, slow to learn the lesson that there is 
but one depth, but one interior, and that is — his purpose. 
When joy or calamity or genius shall show him it, the woods, 
the farms, the city shopmen and cab drivers, indifferently 
with prophet or friend, will mirror back to him its unfathom- 
able depth, its populous solitude." The sweep of that sen- 
tence from woods, farms and shopmen to populous solitudes, 
is a typical specimen of Emerson's melody and volitation. 
He has many such sentences, many paragraphs and pages 
of such prose harmonies. 

The texture of his thought is so richly metaphorical, he is 
such a master of analogy that you wonder, as you wonder in 
reading Lamb and Newman and Ruskin, why a man of high 
feelings and noble eloquence, saturated with the poetry of 
life and the words of the great poets, should yet fail to be a 
poet. Emerson yearned ardently to be a poet and attain to 
"that splendid dialect," but his verse is inconsiderable beside 
his prose. It expresses his leading thoughts, but they are 
again and again better expressed in his essays. Perplexing it 
is to pass from the rigid cramped verses that precede the 
sections of "The Conduct of Life" into the grand resonances 
of the essays themselves. For some reason he never learned 



74 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

the art of verse, A few of his poems, Hke the "Concord 
Hymn," "The Humble Bee," and two or three perfect 
quatrains, place him among the genuine poets whom we call 
minor because the major poets are so miraculously above 
them. You come frequently upon lines of Emerson's that 
are near to poetry but which instantly confess their failure 
by reminding you of the better poets. For example, the 
flower says : 

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you. 

The reader's mind rushes beyond Emerson to Blake's 
perfect "Tiger, Tiger." 

As Emerson delicately says of Thoreau, the thyme and 
marjoram are not quite transmuted into honey. To him 
may be applied his own lines at the beginning of the poem, 
"Destiny": 

That you are fair or wise is vain. 
Or strong, or rich, or generous; 
You must add the untaught strain 
That sheds beauty on the rose. 

Always strong, rich, wise, generous, sometimes quaintly 
fair and sweet, Emerson's poetry lacks the untaught, un- 
teachable strain of ultimate poetry. We remember it chiefly 
because it is Emerson's. If this seem grudging, let it be 
remembered that it implies a standard worthy of him, a 
standard which he himself raised in his many magnificent 
passages about poets and poetry. 

The true Emerson is the splendid prose, of which almost 



EMERSON 75 

every page shows his "divination, grand aims, hospitality 
of soul." 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. 
He died in Concord, Massachusetts, April 27, 1882. His 
father, pastor of the First Church in Boston, died when 
Emerson was eight years old, leaving the family poor. 
Emerson was never well-to-do, but was passing rich on a few 
hundred a year, most of which he earned by lecturing, which 
he called "peddling his hterary pack of notions." He went 
to Harvard and studied for the ministry. In 1829 he was 
called to the Second Church in Boston. Three years later 
he resigned, because he did not believe in the communion 
rite. His sermon on "The Lord's Supper" (now published in 
"Miscellanies"), in which he announced his intention of with- 
drawing from the ministry, may be regarded as his first essay; 
the unperturbed candour and intellectual integrity and the 
modestly authoritative way of saying things are there first 
revealed. His anxieties affected his usually excellent health, 
and he made a voyage to the Mediterranean. On this journey 
and a later one he met some of the distinguished European 
men of letters, notably Carlyle. " English Traits " is a record 
of his travels. The rest of his life he spent at Concord, which 
he left only to give lectures. He contributed to the Dial, 
which he edited for some years, and to the Atlantic Monthly, 
and from time to time assembled his lectures and poems in 
small volumes. In 1829 he married Ellen Louise Tucker; 
she died in 1832. In 1835 he married Lydia Jackson. 



76 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

His chief works are: Historical Discourse at Concord, 
1835; Lecturers on Biography (spoken discourses), 1835; Na- 
ture, 1836; The American Scholar (Phi Beta Kappa oration 
at Harvard, delivered), 1837; Essays, First Series, 1841; Es- 
says, Second Series, 1844; The Young American: A Lecture, 
1844; Poems, 1847, 1865; Miscellanies, 1849; Representative 
Men, 1850; English Traits, 1856; The Conduct of Life, 1860; 
May-Day, 1867; Society and Solitude, 1870; Parnassus (an 
anthology of poetry), 1874; Letters and Social Aims, 1875; 
Poems, Revised, 1878; The Fortune of the Republic, 1878; 
The Sovereignty of Ethics, 1878; Lectures and Biographical 
Sketches, 1883; Natural History of the Intellect, 1893; 
Journals, 1820-1872, edited by E. W. Emerson and W. E. 
Forbes (6 vols, so far published), 1909, 1910, 1911. 

The best "Life" of Emerson is by J. E. Cabot. The finest 
critical and biographical study is that by G. E. Woodberry. 
Excellent essays are those by J. R. Lowell, Matthew Arnold, 
and J. J. Chapman. 



CHAPTER V 
HAWTHORNE 

Literature m its romantic mood, that is, humanity in its 
romantic mood, looks at life with its eyes focused on 
distant visions. The foreground of actuality is blurred. 
When the vision is strong, it sees more beautiful things than 
the sharpest perception of realism can find in the immediate 
spectacle which it strives to penetrate, for then romanticism 
is poetry. Romance takes great risks. When it succeeds, its 
triumph is supreme; all men come under its spell and the most 
sullen realist cannot deny it. When its vision is weak, it is 
the most lamentable falsifier; its eye is dissolute and drunken, 
and it is cried out upon by honesty and intellectual courage. 

The romantic, looking beyond life, turns in two directions, 
either to a timeless land that never can exist or to a past that 
never did exist. The typical expression of modern romance 
is the historical novel, in which the unwarranted fundamental 
assumption is that life was once more interesting than it is 
now. Taking a few picturesque historic facts for its ground- 
cloth, romance embroiders pretty pictures at will, childishly 
indifferent to fact. Realism says: "I will draw my neigh- 
bour's soul." Romance says: "I will draw the soul of some 
person who lived long ago and was more entertaining than 
my neighbour," or " I will draw some aspect of soul that never 

77 



78 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

was in human shape, some twist of mind, terrible, fantastic 
or sheerly beautiful." Both methods are good — when they 
are adopted by powerful writers. But romance has been so 
abused in English fiction of the nineteenth century that some 
of us are heartily tired of it, and there are few modern 
romancers who still hold us. 

Hawthorne is one of the few. If his work is not great, it 
is at least sincere, beautiful, free from false notes, fragile 
amid the stronger geniuses of his age, yet thoroughly manly 
and dignified. He is a born romancer, consistent and never 
in doubt as to what he was trying to do; writing, it seems, 
at least in his earlier years, to please himself. He shrinks 
from life. Personally he is shy and secluded, though not so 
morbid as to brawnier natures he may appear. His artistic 
imagination, as fine a gift as was ever bestowed on any man 
except the great poets, is baffled, even wounded by the 
rougher human facts amid which he passes his life. The 
sketch of the Custom House which introduces "The Scarlet 
Letter" is so shrewdly realistic that it roused some local 
resentments, but it is quite singular in his work; he wrote 
little else in the same spirit. His notebooks of travel con- 
tain some clear flashes of present reality, yet for the most part 
they offer the obverse side of the romantic imagination, its 
disillusion, its sadness for dreams unfulfilled. So strongly 
does this mood of sensitive chagrin express itself in his 
reflections on EngHsh life that Hawthorne, most modest and 
gentlest of men, who looked upon social conditions at home 
and abroad with melancholy indifference, was thought by 
some of our British cousins to have made a Yankee attack on 



HAWTHORNE 79 

the mother-country. Hawthorne himself was puzzled that 
any one should attach weight to his opinions, which are so 
lacking in any spirit of aggression or even of analysis. He 
was recording moods. He was aloof from the English, just 
as he was aloof from Yankees and Southerners. The quarrel 
between the American states merely deepened his gravity 
and filled him with silent unhappiness. For the political 
grapplings of the time he had neither mind nor heart. Neither 
on one side nor on the other of that great conflict which shook 
the souls of his contemporaries did he say anything which 
is now worth remembering. The accidents of friendship 
enlisted his literary competence to write a "campaign biog- 
raphy" of Franklin Pierce. It is as if Shelley had been 
college chum of some British statesman and had written 
whatever it is in England that corresponds to American 
campaign biographies. 

In the preface of "The Marble Faun" Hawthorne says; 
"Italy, as the site of this romance, was chiefly valuable to 
him as affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where 
actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon as they 
are, and must needs be, in America. No author, without a 
trial, can conceive the difficulty of writing a romance about 
a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, 
no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a com- 
monplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is 
happily the case with my dear native land." 

Mr. Henry James seems to accept Hawthorne's view that 
his limitations were objective, and that he might have done 
greater work if he had lived somewhere else. When Mr. 



80 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

James wrote his excellent little book, he had exchanged one 
provincialism for another in the pursuit of his own literary 
career, and this explains, perhaps, why he presses the idea 
that America was not rich in material for the maker of 
stories. His list of things which America did not have where- 
with to stimulate the literary imagination leaves his "dear 
native land" more shiveringly naked than does Hawthorne's 
own complaint of his country's romantic poverty. It is 
not strange that Hawthorne's temperament should be dis- 
satisfied with the life about him, but it is strange that Mr. 
James, a confirmed reahst and analytic critic, should not see 
that the dissatisfaction was due to the nature of Hawthorne's 
genius, that he did not depend on his environment or make 
full use of it. For the most part he simply ignored it. He 
liked what no country in any era presents in the daylight 
glare of actuality. 

Naturally, one fond of haunted castles, ghosts, and un- 
earthly mysteries does not seek them on Broadway, New 
York, which is two hundred years old, nor yet on the Strand, 
in London, which is a thousand years old. He seeks them 
in his mind and in written legend, the only places where they 
exist. Every society, new or old, is rich in shadows, tragedies, 
picturesque and gloomy wrongs as old as Adam. The true 
novelist sees these contrasts, these terrible depths, and makes 
stories of them, but not the romancer of any race or age whose 
favourite haunt is a "fairy precinct." In one mood Haw- 
thorne evidently feels that in contemporaneous and local soci- 
ety there is abundant material for one who can improve it, for 
in "The House of the Seven Gables" he says apropos of Hoi- 



HAWTHORNE 81 

grave: "A romance on the plan of Gil Bias, adapted to Ameri- 
can society and manners, would cease to be a romance. The 
experience of many individuals among us who think it hardly 
worth the telling would equal the vicissitudes of the Span- 
iard's earlier life; while their ultimate success, or the point 
whither they tend, may be incomparably higher than any 
that a novelist would imagine for his hero." 

However that may be, it is not true that Hawthorne lacked 
materials or that he suffered for want of literary surroundings, 
as Mr. James seems to think; he did not prospect the wealth 
that lay at his door; and after success crowned his efforts he 
was solitary from choice in a society that had a not incon- 
siderable cluster of distinguished poets and essayists. Fields 
had to seek him and coax his manuscript from him. The 
memoirs of the charming circle at Concord show that all 
respected him but none was intimate with him. He was a 
wanderer in dreams. He felt life to be stark and flat, and, 
deceived by the story-book pictures of Europe, he hoped, like 
many American youths, to find a greater world across the 
sea. But when he really saw Europe he was disappointed. 
"The Marble Faun" does not reveal the action of a starved 
imagination finding at last the abundant beauty it had 
yearned for, but is curiously cold, colder than "The Scarlet 
Letter." 

Hawthorne carried his climate with him, his skies are 
neither American nor Italian. Until biography reminds you 
of it, you do not think of Hawthorne as a New Englander 
hindered or enriched by the geographic soil of his being. He 
held his universe in his head and was all too little impressed 



Sa THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

by the parts of the external universe in which the collateral 
records show him to have worked, married and had his 
house. 

That his clear eye was able to see momentous realities 
when he chose to look at them is shown by such a remark as 
that in "Our Old Home," where, speaking of British poverty 
and wealth, he says: "Is, or is not, the system wrong that 
gives one married pair so immense a superfluity of luxurious 
home and shuts a million others from any home whatever? 
One day or another, safe as they deem themselves, and safe 
as the hereditary temper of the people really tends to make 
them, the gentlemen of England will be compelled to face 
this question." The most analytic sociologist of the year 
1850 could not have put it more plainly, more prophetically. 
It is the problem which in this year of grace the gentlemen of 
England and America and other countries, are being forced 
to face; no other question equals it in the thought of our 
time, and the best fiction of to-day is aware of it. Similar 
problems, social contrasts teeming with ideas fit for the 
dramatic imagination to grasp and embody in art, were pres- 
ent to Hawthorne's eyes if his nature had led him to look 
at them. The commonplace prosperity of his native land, 
which he thought so cheerfully uninteresting, was blotted 
with glooms, and the country was in the throes of tremen- 
dously exciting moral and political wars. But he who showed 
fine clarity of vision during the few moments when he 
opened his eyes to life, and who expressed every idea he 
wished to express with perfect lucidity, did not often face 
any question that we now conceive to have been crying out 



HAWTHORNE 83 

at him every day. He shut himself up with spooks and 
queer quasi-psychological mysteries. 

Fictitious literary history is wont to regard Hawthorne as 
the chronicler and poetic embodiment of the Puritan spirit. 
The Puritans were gloomy and Hawthorne was gloomy; be- 
hold, the assimilation is perfect, the heredity is self-evident. 
In sooth, Hawthorne was the least Puritan of the New Eng- 
land writers; the spirit, the character, the history of his 
Puritan forefathers he did not know any better than he 
knew the history and characters of mediaeval Italians whose 
palaces and dungeons he gazed on without much enthusiasm. 
Puritanism never produces art; it kills art. As well speak of 
a deaf violinist as of a Puritan poet. When Milton is making 
poetry he is a pagan: as Puritan he either does not write 
or writes badly. The Puritan, like any other human being, 
can be made the subject of art, but he himself is artistically 
barren and inarticulate. The removal of Puritan inhibitions 
was a necessary condition of the beginning of anything like 
art in New England, and Hawthorne was notably free from 
the spirit of Puritanism. He was as far removed as Poe from 
any sort of ethical tradition that prevailed about him or that 
had prevailed before him. Indeed, he was the only one of 
the New Englanders who was purely artistic; and this fact 
is fundamentally related to the other fact that he was the 
only New England man of letters who was not deeply moved 
by black slavery or any of the burning issues of the time. 
He was interested in fanciful manifestations of the soul, not 
in genuine ethical problems; his home was fairyland, and he 
was especially fain of haunted woods and treacherous bogs. 



84 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

He approached the Puritans just as he approached Greek 
Wonder Tales. "The Scarlet Letter" is in no sense a 
historical novel of Puritan life, any more than Macbeth is 
a study of the early history of Scotland. The problem of 
conscience is not for Hawthorne an aspect of the national 
mind or of the moral development of his "dear native land." 
It is a motive for story and legend to be wrought out in the 
purple colours of which he was master. The soul suffering 
from remorse is creepy and fascinating, and Hawthorne plays 
with it as Poe does, and as Stevenson does in "Markheim." 
People will continue to regard Hawthorne as the Blossom of 
Puritanism and to picture his handsomely melancholy face 
as a spiritual descendant of witch-hangers. That is the 
clicM of the matter and it is in all the books. But Hawthorne, 
fortunately, was a mildly irreverent man, charmed by the 
colours of things, and somewhat sceptical of the intense 
beliefs of his contemporaries. The theme of "The Scarlet 
Letter" appealed less to his moral sense than to his pictorial 
imagination. He turned the symbol over and over, and 
embroidered his story with it. It is a red spot on a gray 
colonial dress. It is a bloody brand on a man's breast. It 
is a fiery portent in the sky. Hawthorne was enamoured of 
its hue and he designed it cunningly like a worker in tapestry 
against the tortured conscience of Dimmesdale, and against 
Chillingworth, the skulking ghost of revenge. They are 
two tones of blackish purple. Pearl is another colour, not a 
human child, but a symbolized flower of sin, a gem in the 
darkness. 

"'What little bird of scarlet plumage may this be.'* Me- 



HAWTHORNE 85 

thinks I have seen just such figures when the sun has been 
shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out 
the golden and crimson images across the floor. . , . Art 
thou one of those naughty elfs or fairies, whom we thought 
to have left behind us, with other relics of Papistry, in merry 
old England?' 

"'I am my mother's child,' answered the scarlet vision, 
'and my name is Pearl.' 

'"Pearl ? — Ruby, rather ! — or Coral — or Red 
Rose ! '" 

So speaks the old clergyman who was "nurtured at the 
rich bosom of the English church." And so speaks Haw- 
thorne, the lover of pigments. 

The story of Hester is not poignantly tragic, it is not even 
sentimentally pathetic like Goethe's story of Margaret. 
Hester Prynne is a "vaguely defined figure aloft on the place 
of shame." She does not live in the real world of the Rev. 
Cotton Mather, his "Magnalia," nor in the other real world 
of Thomas Hardy's "Tess." The development of her char- 
acter, under sufiPering and the sweet influence of her child, 
is an abstract idea, beautifully suggested, but not the growth 
of a human heart in the breast of a flesh-and-blood woman. 
Dimmesdale is a voice, a clerical garment, a flat figure in a 
thin morality play, not a man whose passion has overcome 
a woman. 

"The Scarlet Letter" is a prose poem, a development of 
the theme: "On a Field Sable, the Letter A, Gules." To 
regard it as a novel of human character is to dissolve its 
enchantment. As well look for character in "The Eve of 



86 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

St. Agnes" or "Christabel," or "The Fall of The House of 
Usher." Each person in the story is a mood, a tone. Chilling- 
worth's approach is Uke a change of the weather, a pervasive 
shadow darkening the sky. Dimmesdale and the gloom of 
the forest blend not as a living man with nature but as a sad 
theme of music with sombre under-harmonies. 

So understood, "The Scarlet Letter" is a perfect book. 
No word, no suggestion, detail or scene, but is set in its place 
with sure artistry. Hawthorne knew thoroughly the nature 
and the methods of his art. He did not stumble into success, 
but worked with his eyes open. In the early years when he 
was practising his craft without public recognition, destroy- 
ing some tales and sending others forth upon a sea of indiffer- 
ence, he found out all there was to know about his capacities, 
and he became as sophisticated as Poe in the calculation of his 
effects. In the preface of "The House of the Seven Gables" 
he has expressed finally the spirit and intention of his work 
and marked clearly the boundary between the adjacent 
realms of Romance and Novel. That preface should be read 
as a general introduction to Hawthorne's work. His request 
that " the book be read strictly as a Romance, having a great 
deal more to do with the clouds overhead than with any por- 
tion of the actual soil of the County of Essex" is applicable 
to all his stories. 

"The House of the Seven Gables" begins in the tone of a 
novel, is entered over a threshold of actuality. The history 
of the house is told in a daylight, matter-of-fact tone, and 
the opening chapters about Hepzibah and her shop, about 
Uncle Venner and the little boy who bought the gingerbread. 



HAWTHORNE 87 

seem less like the typically Hawthornesque than like the 
work of the naturalistic sketchers of New England manners. 
But after the reahstic beginning, the world becomes murky. 
The lover of beauty, Clifford, made imbecile by his sufferings, 
haunts the house like a ghost. The villain of the piece, 
Judge Pyncheon, stalks in and out, wearing a gloomy aura. 
Holgrave dabbles in hypnotism and practises his black art 
on the very hens in the yard. Through these shadows shine 
the bright but artificial beams of Phoebe's cheerful innocence. 
She is the Pearl-motive under a different name. The plot 
is tenuous. Concealed papers, opportunely discovered and 
enriching the oppressed and defrauded, do not convince a 
reader whose fancy has been clarified by the sunny laugh of 
Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey." Hawthorne's genius, 
however, works wonders with outworn and primitive machin- 
ery, and the kaleidoscopic pictures which Maule's Well 
throws up are still potent to bewitch the eye. 

"The Blithedale Romance" is the nearest to human life 
of all Hawthorne's longer stories. It is free from super- 
natural devices, and the characters are human. For once 
he found real romance, or the foundation of it, in actual life. 
Brook Farm was itself romantic, a society of dreamers whose 
extraordinary ideas and exceptional personalities set them 
apart from the normal world. Hawthorne does not portray 
Brook Farm; he distinctly denies any intention to describe 
biographically that ephemeral oasis in the hard desert of the 
American commonwealth. But the Utopia was an actual 
thing; it was instinctively poetic; it was composed of persons 
of interesting minds who aspired in their way to a cloudland 



88 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

where Hawthorne, who had arrived by another route, was 
already at home. 

Called in its time "socialistic," Brook Farm was, of course, 
not only remote from modern socialism but antithetic to 
it. It is not easy to define it in terms that have changed 
their colour in the course of a century of social projects 
and experiences. The principles of Brook Farm were 
not exactly those of Proudhon nor those of Fourier, but 
were in the air — in more senses than one. Retreat 
from society for personal improvement is not socialistic; 
it is selfish (with no immoral implication); it is excessive 
individualism and is as old as Oriental eremitism. The 
Brook Farmers sought a better mode of life for themselves 
and a few friends. They did not understand or attempt 
to study the structure of society as a whole. They helped 
nobody to a permanent living; they added not a jot to our 
knowledge of economics, except to confirm the truth which 
fifty experiments have taught, that small philanthropic com- 
munities cannot leaven the economic mass. 

The failure of Brook Farm was due to its nescience of the 
individual and social bread-and-butter problem, which is 
the basis of life. Its value lay in the stimulating association 
of interesting people, which is in the long run never a com- 
plete failure, for it has the function of an informal university. 
When one intense mind lives with another, intellectual sparks 
fly. The collapse of Brook Farm contains a real lesson, 
which was rather pathetically ignored by the participants, 
whose mental reaction was that of disillusion and disappoint- 
ment. Heaven had failed; therefore there was no Heaven, 



HAWTHORNE 89 

or it was somewhere else. It is remarkable how little clear, 
candid record of the experiment the chief actors have left 
us. There are some pleasant reminiscences and biographies. 
There are some satirical reflections. But the whole history 
of the undertaking is veiled, as if failure had made the fine- 
souled and sensitive partners reluctant to talk. 

No very memorable idea, no precious bit of literature flow- 
ered from Brook Farm except "The Blithedale Romance," 
written by one who was in it but not of it. Hawthorne, 
the most unfit man in New England for communistic asso- 
ciation of any sort, visited Brook Farm, a gracious, slightly 
sardonic shadow, observed, said little, and went his way with 
a book in his head. He is pictured by some one who was 
there as sitting astride a chair listening with a flickering smile 
to an intense argument on the whole duty of man or some 
other inclusive topic. He contributed nothing to the dis- 
cussion, but his ears were open and his eyes, dreamy but very 
clear, were taking in the scene. Here before him was romance, 
the strange in human character, the unworldly in the world. 
Here were people of vigorous personality, eccentric, shaded 
with lines not seen upon the common face of man. Once in 
his life he was having a genuine experience satisfying to his 
romantic imagination. 

Through the poet, Coverdale, past the age of warmest 
enthusiasm and gifted with a delicate humour, Hawthorne 
tells his story, the best, most varied, most persuasively 
human of his books. It is full of a tender sympathy for the 
dreams of man; the dreamer who wrote it responded to other 
dreamers. And it is hued with a spirit found nowhere else in 



90 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Hawthorne's fiction, a fine irony, the soul of New England 
common-sense, but of common-sense reserved and tender, 
unwilling to break the spell. 

The talk in the book is excellent, the best in Hawthorne's 
work. The characters are intelligent and full of ideas, and 
therefore their talk, while preserving the natural accents of 
human speech, can be kept at a high intellectual pitch. Not 
only the talk, but Hawthorne-Coverdale's reflections have 
a sharp edge; the romancer is for once a sharp commentator 
on humanity. There is in Hawthorne a more thoughtful 
humourist than is glimpsed through the unhuman moods of 
his other books. Two passages illustrate this unusual aspect 
of his mind — would that it had revealed itself of tener ! 

"The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should 
fail in becoming practical agriculturists but that we should 
probably cease to be anything else. While our enterprises 
lay all in theory, we had pleased ourselves with delectable 
visions of the spiritualization of labour. It was to be our 
form of prayer and ceremonial of worship. Each stroke of 
the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom here- 
tofore hidden from the sun. Pausing in the field, to let the 
wind exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were to 
look upward and catch ghmpses into the far-off soul of truth. 
In this point of view, matters did not turn out quite so well 
as we anticipated. It is very true that, sometimes, gazing 
casually around me, out of the midst of my toil, I used to 
discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scenes of 
earth and sky. There was, at such moments, a novelty, an 
unwonted aspect, on the face of Nature, as if she had been 



HAWTHORNE 91 

taken by surprise and seen at unawares, with no opportunity 
to put off her real look and assume the mask with which she 
mysteriously hides herself from mortals. But this was all. 
The clods of earth, which we so constantly belaboured and 
turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. 
Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. 
Our labour symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish 
in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompat- 
ible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman 
and the scholar — the yeoman and the man of finest moral 
culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity 
— are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or 
welded into one substance." 

"I had already begun to suspect that Hollingsworth, 
like many other illustrious prophets, reformers, and philan- 
thropists, was likely to make at least two proselytes among 
the women to one among the men." 

Shrewd Yankee observer! how comes it that he did not 
look oftener into the face of things with this wise smile, 
and so turn his marvellous lucidity of language to the great 
end of understanding hfe instead of making a spurious 
romance of Italy? 

"The Marble Faun" is the most obviously factitious 
of Hawthorne's books. Its defect is dual, in the selection 
of material with which he was not perfectly in sympathy 
and in unsureness of workmanship, uncertainty of tone — 
a very grave fault for Hawthorne whose writing is elsewhere 
so sound and well managed. In his other long romances, 
and his many exquisite short tales, Hawthorne's supreme 



92 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

excellence lies in his ability to suggest a mood or a colour 
and keep the reader wholly under the spell of it. "The 
Marble Faun" falters and breaks its own illusions. The 
country, the actual scenery where the story is laid, calls out 
to the tourist, Hawthorne, to describe it and make comments 
on its history and its differences from his "dear native land." 
As a human being he cannot avoid this, and so he polishes 
up his traveller's notes. Now, he is a veiy honest man and 
his traveller's notes are the expression of disillusion; the plain 
fact is, he does not like Italy, though he is finely eloquent 
in describing a beautiful thing here and there. On a basis 
of disillusioned romance and honest miscomprehension of 
the Italian people and the ruins of history, he erects a tragic 
plot which plays in and out among the studios of artists, 
whose work he does not understand either aesthetically or 
humanly. He is amazingly not at home in a scene which 
nevertheless has enough of the picturesque and the unfamiliar 
to excite him and suggest a story. A competent master 
of romance, he is puzzled by a "romantic" country and he 
inevitably wavers. 

The "Conclusion" of "The Marble Faun" is a confession 
of impotence. The story does not arrive. The white 
innocence of Hilda against a dark crime might be a strong 
motive, but it is not. The reason is that the crime is not 
convincing; spooks and half -realized personages are the 
actors, and Hilda, "based, as it were, upon a cloud, and all 
surrounded with misty substance," is backed by substance 
of darker colour but quite as nebulous, and that again is 
confounded with a deeper background, which Hawthorne, 



HAWTHORNE 93 

the tourist, dazedly looks upon and which the rest of us, 
readers of literature if not tourists in Italy, have in our 
imaginations as a solid reality. The Faun's transformation 
is no change in human character wrought by events, for he 
does not start his life in Hawthorne's book as a conceivable 
human man. We cannot be tragically moved by the sin 
or the dark glances of Miriam, because we do not take her 
to our hearts as a suffering woman; she is a ghost, not an 
inch thicker for her dark eyes and her deep mysteries of soul. 

The most interesting thing about the book, to one who, 
while reading the story for itself, is at the same time inter- 
ested to read Nathaniel Hawthorne, is that it reveals him 
as a virginal naive imagination (for all his Uterary sophisti- 
cation) shrinking from the obsolescence and decrepitude 
of Rome and more likable and childlike than Hilda herself. 
The Eternal City perplexed his simple poetic nature. For 
painting and sculpture and the monuments of antiquity 
he had no real taste. The personal shivers and aversions 
which creep into his story are quite the most human veraci- 
ties in the book. The fact is that imaginatively he does 
not believe in his own story, so that in telling it he stammers 
charmingly. 

Has the Faun pointed ears concealed under his locks? 
Is any reader of great fiction even mildly interested in the 
answer? The quasi-Italian palaces and towers melt away 
while you are looking at them, before they have fairly caught 
the eye. To bring the matter to a violent contrast of 
merit, a half dozen of Marion Crawford's anglicized stories 
of Italy are truer-seeming Italy and better stories than this 



94 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

work of the earlier American romancer. Except — and the 
exception is greater than the main proposition — except 
that Hawthorne's invariable distinction of mind, his luminous 
gift of style, his fine cadences redeem all his material and 
make even his flimsiest book an exquisite pleasure for those 
who love Enghsh words. 

Hawthorne's earliest work and, within its compass, some 
of the best of his work is to be found in his short tales. 
"The Minister's Black Veil," "The Birthmark," "The 
Great Stone Face," "Ethan Brand," "Feathertop" are 
the sort of stories that tell no story, but create a condition 
of mind, produce a mood. Every reader can remember the 
sensation of one of these tales, but you will have difficulty 
in telling some one else what the tale is about. Hawthorne 
is a conjurer of moods, a prose-poet. He stands alone in 
the Uterature of New England, a verbal melodist without 
any ethical intention whatsoever, a delicate detached artist, 
as soUtary in Concord as Poe was in New York; symbolizing, 
if he symboUzes anything, not the Puritan spirit, but the 
spirit of beauty everlastingly hostile or indifferent to the 
crabbed austerities and the soul-killing morbidity of Puritan 
ethics. Neither the philosophic Hbrary of Emerson nor the 
polyglot anthology of Longfellow announces so assuredly 
as the frail art of Hawthorne that civilization has dawned 
upon the Calvinistic barbarism of our colonial ancestors. 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, 
July 4, 1804. He died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, 



HAWTHORNE 95 

May 19, 1864. The fact that his father and grandfather 
were sea captains is more important than that a remote 
ancestor was one of the judges in the Salem witchcraft 
trials. Hawthorne, if not Hawthorne's biographers, suc- 
cessfully outUved the judge. He graduated at Bowdoin 
College in 1825, a classmate of Longfellow. For some 
years after graduation he lived in seclusion trying his pen. 
In 1839 he was appointed to an obscure place in the Boston 
Custom House. He spent the year 1841-2 at Brook Farm. 
In 1842 he married Sophia Peabody and settled for a while 
at the Old Manse in Concord. From 1846 to 1849 he was 
surveyor at the Salem Custom House. Thereafter he lived 
at Lenox, West Newton and Concord. In 1853 he was 
appointed Consul at Liverpool by his college friend, Frankhn 
Pierce. He held the post during Pierce's administration 
and then travelled in Europe for three years. He spent 
the rest of his Ufe at Concord. 

His works are: Fanshawe, 1828; Twice-Told Tales, 1837; 
Grandfather's Chair, 1841; Famous Old People, 1841; 
Liberty Tree, 1842; Biographical Stories for Children, 1842j 
Twice-Told Tales (with additions), 1842; Mosses from 
an Old Manse, 1846; The Scarlet Letter, 1850; True 
Stories, 1851; The House of the Seven Gables, 1851; 
A Wonder Book, 1851; The Snow Image, etc., 1851; 
The Blithedale Romance, 1852; Tanglewood Tales, 
1853; The Marble Faun, 1860; Our Old Home, 1863; 
Passages from American Note-Books, 1868; Passages 
from English Note-Books, 1870; Passages from French 
and Italian Note-Books, 1871; Septimius Felton, 1871; 



96 THE Sl»IRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

The Dolliver Romance, 1876; Doctor Grimshawe's Se- 
cret, 1883. 

"Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife," by Julian Haw- 
thorne contains all the essential biographical matter. A 
good literary biography is "A Study of Hawthorne" by G. 
P. Lathrop. The "Life" by Henry James, in English Men 
of Letters, is a very distinguished piece of work by one of 
the best critical minds of our time. The "Life" by G. E. 
Woodberry in American Men of Letters is excellent. 



CHAPTER VI 
LONGFELLOW 

On the death of Longfellow, Whitman wrote a tribute 
to the other "good gray poet," which is so just and beautiful 
that it should be known to all who are interested in either 
Longfellow or Whitman. 

"Longfellow in his voluminous works seems to me not 
only to be eminent in the style and forms of poetical expres- 
sion that mark the present age (an idiosyncrasy, almost 
a sickness, of verbal melody), but to bring what is always 
dearest as poetry to the general human heart and taste, 
and probably must be so in the nature of things. He is 
certainly the sort of bard and counteractant most needed 
for our materialistic, self-assertive, money -worshipping 
Anglo-Saxon races, and especially for the present age in 
America — an age tyrannically regulated with reference to 
the manufacturer, the merchant, the financier, the politi- 
cian and the day workman — for whom and among whom 
he comes as the poet of melody, courtesy, deference — poet of 
the mellow twilight of the past in Italy, Germany, Spain, and 
in northern Europe — poet of all sympathetic gentleness — 
and universal poet of women and young people. I should 
have to think long if I were asked to name the man who has 
done more, and in more valuable directions, for America. 

97 



98 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

"I doubt if there ever was such a fine intuitive judge 
and selecter of poems. His translations of many German 
and Scandinavian pieces are said to be better than the 
vernaculars. He does not urge or lash. His influence is 
like good drink or air. He is not tepid either, but always 
vital, with flavour, motion, grace. He strikes a splendid 
average, and does not sing exceptional passions, or human- 
ity's jagged escapades. He is not revolutionary, brings 
nothing offensive or new, does not deal hard blows. On the 
contrary, his songs soothe and heal, or if they excite, it is a 
healthy and agreeable excitement. His very anger is 
gentle, is at second hand (as in the 'Quadroon Girl' and the 
'Witnesses'). 

"There is no undue element of pensiveness in Longfellow's 
strains. Even in the early translation, the Manrique, the 
movement is as of strong and steady wind or tide, holding 
up and buoying. Death is not avoided through his many 
themes, but there is something almost winning in his original 
verses and renderings on that dread subject — as, closing 
the 'Happiest Land' dispute 

And then the landlord's daughter 

Up to heaven raised her hand. 
And said, ' Ye may no more contend, — 

There lies the happiest land!' 

"To the ungracious complaint-charge of his want of 
racy nativity and special originality, I shall only say that 
America and the world may well be reverently thankful — 
can never be thankful enough — for any such singing-bird 
vouchsafed out of the centuries, without asking that the 



LONGFELLOW 99 

notes be different from those of other songsters; adding 
what I have heard Longfellow himself say, that ere the 
New World can be worthily original, and announce herself 
and her own heroes, she must be well saturated with the 
originality of others, and respectfully consider the heroes 
that lived before Agamemnon." 

Longfellow is the household poet of America; the laureate- 
ship was conferred on him by popular response, immediate, 
spontaneous and continuous. When that is said, whatever 
may be added is less significant. It is a noble fate to be 
for many years the poet most cherished by a million hearths. 
The multitudinous electorate may not crown the highest 
poetry, but whatever it does choose and long adhere to is 
indubitably important in human history. 

Longfellow was the first American man of letters to estab- 
lish for a busy and unlearned people a visible relation be- 
tween academic culture and actual Uterary accomplishment. 
During eighteen of his most productive years, when he was 
well known to his countrymen as th^ poet of their simplest 
sentiments, he was a teacher of modern languages and 
literature at Harvard College. The poet who delighted the 
common heart with sweet song and pleasant ballad was 
Professor Longfellow. As a rule professors write books 
which are useful only to other professors and to students 
obedient to academic prescription. From Professor Long- 
fellow's study a voice reached the popular ear. This man, 
official tutor in an institution monastically remote from the 
life of the toiling many, could say in wholly intelligible 
verse how a common man feels who has lost a child; he 



100 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

knew how to touch the despair of drudgery and raise it to 
confidence and a sense of personal dignity. He honoured 
in a plain unpatronizing way the village blacksmith, and 
in every American village the blacksmith is a useful citizen. 
He had a heart for ships and shipbuilders, and he gave new 
meaning to the Fourth-of-July orator's figure of the "ship 
of state" by symbolizing it in a real ship of hewn timbers. 
Long poems are hard to read, and solid pages of verse repel 
the unaccustomed reader, but Longfellow told the stories of 
Evangeline, Miles Standish and Hiawatha in verse almost 
as easy to read as prose. 

The poet-professor, who was the emissary of academic 
culture to the untutored, was also the ambassador of creative 
literature to a museum of intellectual antiquities in which 
Greek roots were esteemed above the flowers of living song. 
This poet with fine manners, dignity and delicate taste, 
lover of music, responsive to the contemporary songs of 
the nations, bore a torch of living culture among rusty 
grammarians and the hebraical sons of a decadent but still 
stupid Puritanism. His successor, Lowell, and his friend, 
Norton, carried the torch on, and then it went out; there 
came the time when the teaching of modern literature in 
American universities, at Harvard certainly, was divided 
between philologists on the one hand, men with no literary 
sense, who reduce Shakespeare and Milton to archaeological 
specimens, and, on the other hand, amiable dilettanti who 
illustrate the truth of Tanner's epigram: "He who can 
does; he who cannot teaches." Longfellow and Lowell 
were beneficent blunderers into that reahn of degreed and 



LONGFELLOW 101 

gowned authority where the counting of final E's in Chaucer 
is supposed to be the study of poetry and the writing of a 
dull introduction to a superfluously new edition of Hamlet 
entitles a commonplace doctor of philosophy to a professor- 
ship. 

Longfellow brought humane civilization to an American 
university and sent academic culture to the people in his 
great classes beyond the college gates. To both he was the 
bearer of the light of contemporaneous Europe. He not only 
told his pupils about Dante's tomb, but read them snatches 
of folk-song and popular legend. He translated modern 
poetry for his classes, and through his books gave America 
a living sense of the beauty of the Old World. A younger 
Harvard professor thinks that the foundations of Longfellow's 
fame rest almost wholly on his service in discovering to an 
inexperienced nation the splendours of European civilization. 
It was a genuine service, but it was not all nor was it the 
most important. His fame rests on his ability to phrase 
memorably ideas native to all simple minds everywhere. 
It is to be noted that his most cherished poems, from "A 
Psalm of Life" to the long narratives, "Evangeline" and 
"The Courtship of Miles Standish," are on American sub- 
jects or on experiences common to humanity. In "Tales 
of a Wayside Inn," in which are twenty-two stories, the 
best known is "Paul Revere." Nevertheless it is true 
that at the right moment Longfellow made America 
acquainted with some of the gayer beauties and the more 
innocent music of the old nations. 

If one willing to ignore traditional evaluations, to dis- 



102 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

regard popular judgment and services that are an undeniable 
matter of national history, opens Longfellow for the book- 
in-itself, one finds him a third-rate poet. "Third-rate" is 
not meant quite in its contemptuous sense. The first-rate 
poets are Milton, Shakespeare, and Shelley whose poetry 
is sustained through large schemes. Less than that supreme 
poetry is the perfection of short poems and short passages 
in long poems, the perfection of Wordsworth, Keats, Tenny- 
son, Whitman, Browning. Below that perfection Longfellow 
almost always falls. His best work is not unlike Gray's 
in its calm transparency, its pleasant meditation on religious 
and sentimental commonplace. His longer narratives are 
readable,* indeed they find many readers year after year, 
and that alone is enough to distinguish him in a period whose 
poetic achievement is little more than an anthology of lyrics 
and fragments. But in the longer poems of the age, "The 
Prelude" of Wordsworth, and Browning's "The Ring 
and the Book," are superb lines — fragments of gold. There 
are few great lines in Longfellow; in " Christus " the miracu- 
lous does not happen even for a moment, except in the lines 
which are sentences from the English Bible turned almost 
word for word into metre. His verse is evenly and perma- 
nently of secondary quality. The difference between the 
great and the good Longfellow well knew, for he was an 
admirable judge; in his journal he records the opinion that 



*A good way to read "Evangeline" is to forget that it is in metre, to read it 
like prose, as many readers probably do. To me, at least, the hexameters, 
listened for as hexameters, are annoying. English simply will not rim long 
and continuously in this measure. Longfellow, a technical master, made 
more consistently good hexameters than any one else except Arthur Hugh 
Clough. But he failed on the whole. 



LONGFELLOW 103 

Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" is "verse rather than poetry 
after all," 

To remmd ourselves how the first-rate excels what is less 
than first-rate, a few examples will serve. Longfellow says 
in "The Poet's Tale": 

And rivulets, rejoicing, rush and leap 
And wave their fluttering signals from the steep. 

Wordsworth's line is: 

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep. 

Somewhere in the ear is a mentor which advises that Long- 
fellow's lines are verse and Wordsworth's is poetry. 
The end of "The Psalm of Life" is: 

Still achieving, still pursuing, 
Learn to labour and to wait. 

Multitudes have been consoled by those lines. On the 
field of Sebastopol a dying British soldier repeated them. 
Yet they are not comparable with the line so near like them, 
so far above them : 

They also serve who only stand and wait. 

In a sonnet "On Mrs. Kemble's Readings from Shakespeare" 
Longfellow sings: 

O happy reader! having for thy text 

The magic book whose sibylline leaves have caught 

The rarest essence of all human thought. 

The lines are good, but they fail beside Wordsworth's 

Poor earthly casket of immortal verse. 



104 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

It is not simply that Longfellow's ideas are commonplace. 
Both Wordsworth and Tennyson are commonplace and lack- 
ing in passion, but now and again some verbal wizardry 
works a celestial redemption of their intellectual banality. 

The finest things in Longfellow are not those best known. 
The dear public, to whom any critic with a humane sense 
of the uses of literature must at times humbly bow, has 
honoured its poet splendidly — and missed his loftiest 
moments. "A Psalm of Life" would not disgrace a poet's 
juvenile volume, if it were allowed to sleep there. For 
some reason it does not sleep, but stirs the sentiments of 
the very people who may be assumed to know the Psalms 
of David, and knowing them can yet take seriously "A Psalm 
of Life," "Rock of Ages," and other bad hymns! Genuine 
religious feeling makes the heart hospitable to very poor 
religious poetry. One would like to erase "A Psalm of Life" 
from every page whereon it is printed, and from every 
heart wherein it is remembered, and put in its place Long- 
fellow's glorious sonnet to Milton, a sonnet which is peer 
of the great sonnets of Milton himself and of Wordsworth. 

I pace the sounding sea-beach and behold 
How the voluminous billows roll and run. 
Upheaving and subsiding, while the sun 

Shines through their sheeted emerald far unrolled, 

And the ninth wave, slow gathering fold by fold 
All its loose-flowing garments into one, 
Plunges upon the shore, and floods the dun 

Pale reach of sands, and changes them to gold. 

So in majestic cadence rise and fall 



LONGFELLOW 105 

The mighty undulations of thy song, 

O sightless bard, England's Maeonides! 
And ever and anon, high over all 

Uplifted, a ninth wave superb and strong, 

Floods all the soul with its melodious seas. 

The six sonnets that accompany Longfellow's translation 
of Dante are all perfect; the first, especially, remarkable for 
the essential unity of its fine thought, the central metaphor, 
the restrainedly sonorous phrasing, is so flawless in mould 
and noble in content that it stands undiminished at the 
entrance to Dante. 

Oft have I seen at some cathedral door 

A labourer, pausing in the dust and heat, 

Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet 
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor 
Eaieel to repeat his paternoster o'er; 

Far off the noises of the world retreat; 

The loud vociferations of the street 
Become an undistinguishable roar. 

So, as I enter here from day to day, 
And leave my burden at tliis minster gate, 

KneeUng in prayer, and not ashamed to pray. 
The tumult of the time disconsolate 

To inarticulate murmurs dies away. 
While the eternal ages watch and wait. 

That many people would not be interested in poems to 
poets is a conceivable reason why these masterpieces of 
Longfellow are less generally admired than some of his 
verses feeble in sentiment and unelevated by verbal inspira- 
tion. There is, however, one sonnet of his, unsurpassably 



106 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

lovely and poignant with a sorrow universally understood, 
which should have first place in the mind of every sort of 
reader who would care for Longfellow or any poetry. This 
is "The Cross of Snow." 

In the long, sleepless watches of the night, ' 

A gentle face — the face of one long dead — 
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head 

The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light. 

Here in this room she died; and soul more white 
Never through martyrdom of fire was led 
To its repose; nor can in books be read 

The legend of a life more benedight. 

There is a mountain in the distant West 
That, sun-defying, ia its deep ravines 

Displays a cross of snow upon its side. 

Such is the cross I wear up>on my breast 

These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes 

And seasons, changless since the day she died. 

It is characteristic of Longfellow that this poem on the 
dreadful death of his wife should not have been published 
while he lived. He did not utter his more intimate passions, 
and this sonnet indicates that he would not rather than 
that he could not. His restraint is humanly admirable, 
but his poetry suffers because it is not charged with the heat 
of his soul. He is usually objective, bright and clear as prose. 
He seldom excites subtle sorrows or strange moods, never 
lights fiery passions nor disturbs the inner sources of tears 
for all things that are. One exceptional poem which makes 
its effect in a Coleridgean way, without the reader's knowing 
iust what there is in the thought or the melody that moves 



LONGFELLOW 107 

him, is "In the Churchyard at Cambridge," especially the 
first stanza. 

In the village churchyard she Ues, 
Dust is in her beautiful eyes, 

No more she breathes, nor feels, nor stirs; 
At her feet and at her head 
Lies a slave to attend the dead. 

But their dust is white as hers. 

Another poem which would make the fortune of a book 
of "moods" by some young modern, who perhaps might be 
contemptuous of old Longfellow, is this: 

The tide rises, the tide falls, 
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls; 
Along the sea-sands damp and brown 
The traveller hastens toward the town. 
And the tide rises, the tide falls. 

Darkness settles on roofs and walls. 
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls; 
The little waves, with their soft, white hands, 
Efface the footprints on the sands, 
And the tide rises, the tide falls. 

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls 
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls; 
The day returns, but nevermore 
Returns the traveller to the shore. 
And the tide rises, the tide falls. 

Of Longfellow's technical gifts there is no doubt. Either 
because he had not a very deep nature or because his early 



108 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

success showed him what his audience needed, he appHed 
his fine skill to thoughts and feelings usually not striking 
nor powerful, and so he became a very highly refined poet 
of the many. For the multitude who do not read the best 
poetry there is left little except the work of versifiers of 
limited skill, of inferior literary culture, the Hemanses, 
Havergals, Haines Baileys and hymn writers. Longfellow 
devoted an accomplished artistry to a humble grade of poetry, 
as though a competent architect should design workmen's 
cottages or a true musician should prepare an evangelical 
hymnal. 

He appeals everywhere to minds which English writers 
call "middle-class" and French writers call "bourgeois." 
It is hard to find a word that has the right connotation in 
America. "Common people" does not define them, and 
"democrat" is too valuable and excellent a word for them. 
Perhaps "intellectually immature" is just, but the phrase 
sounds snobbish and patronizing. The boys of Harrow — 
or was it Eton? — voted him the finest of poets. The most 
catholic of translators, he was translated in turn into twenty 
languages. He is admired by people who have the gravest 
troubles and the fewest troublesome ideas, who are not 
interested in the intensest expression of the tragedies, stresses 
and ecstasies of life, but who take elementary ideals deeply 
to heart and seek plain elementary answers to daily perplexi- 
ties, who like a touch of strangeness in their poetry but do 
not understand it if the language is too strange. 

In his journal Longfellow says of a poem he is meditating, 
"I must put live beating heart into it." His poetry seems 



LONGFELLOW 109 

passionless, without "live beating heart," as compared 
with the great voices of song, but three generations of simple 
hearts have found Longfellow a vital force in their lives. 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, 
Maine, February 27, 1807. He died in Cambridge, Massa- 
chusetts, March 24, 1882. He was educated at Portland 
Academy and Bowdoin College. On his graduation from 
Bowdoin, in 1825, he was appointed teacher of modern 
languages, and to prepare himself he spent four years in 
Europe. In 1834 he was appointed to succeed George 
Ticknor as Smith Professor of Modern Languages in Harvard 
University, He spent another year in Europe, and in 1837 
settled in Cambridge for the rest of his life. He held the 
chair at Harvard from 1836 to 1854, when he resigned. 
He went abroad in 1842 and again in 1868. He married 
Mary Story Potter in 1831. She died in 1835. In 1843 
he married Francis Elizabeth Appleton. In 1861 she died 
of injuries received by fire. 

His principal works are: Copfeas de Manrique (transla- ^^<^^ 
tion), 1833; Outre-Mer (prose), 1833-34; Hyperion (prose), 
1839; Voices of the Night, 1839; Ballads and Other Poems, 
1841; Poems on Slavery, 1842; The Spanish Student, 1843; 
Poems, 1845; The Poet and Poetry of Europe (compilation), 
1845; The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, 1846; 
Evangeline, 1847; Kavanagh (prose), 1849; The Seaside 
and the Fireside, 1850; The Golden Legend, 1851; Hiawatha, 
1855; The Courtship of Miles Standish, 1858; Tales of a 



110 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Wayside Inn, 1863; Flower-de-Luce, 1866; Dante's Divina 
Commedia (translation), 1867; The New England Tragedies, 
1868; The Divine Tragedy, 1871 (published the following 
year with the New England Tragedies as Christus: A Mys- 
tery); Three Books of Song, 1872; Aftermath, 1873; The 
Masque of Pandora, 1875; Keramos, 1878; Ultima Thule, 
1880; In the Harbour, 1882; Michael Angelo, 1883. 

Longfellow's journals are found in the "Life" by Samuel 
Longfellow, in three volumes. The biography by Thomas 
Wentworth Higginson in American Men of Letters is 
pleasant. In W. E. Henley's "Views and Reviews" is a 
fine appreciation. 



CHAPTER VII 

WIIITTIER 

Whittier's good sense and modest dignity are nowhere 
better expressed than in the verses introductory to his col- 
lected work. 

I love the old melodious lays 
Which softly melt the ages through, 

The songs of Spenser's golden days. 

Arcadian Sidney's silvery phrase, 
Sprinkhng our noon of time with freshest morning dew. 

Yet, vainly in my quiet hours 
To breathe their marvellous notes I try; 

I feel them, as the leaves and flowers 

In sUence feel the dewy showers. 
And drink with glad, still lips the blessing of the sky. 

The rigour of a frozen clime, 
The harshness of an untaught ear. 

The jarring words of one whose rhyme 

Beat often Labour's hurried time. 
Or Duty's rugged march through storm and strife, are here. 

Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace. 
The rounded art no lack supplies; 

Unskilled the subtle lines to trace. 

Or softer shades of Nature's face, 
I view her common forms with unanointed eyes. 

Ill 



112 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Nor mine the seer-like power to show 
The secrets of the heart and mind; 

To drop the plummet-hne below 

Our common world of joy and woe, 
A more intense despair or brighter hope to find. 

Yet here at least an earnest sense 
Of human right and weal is shown; 

A hate of tyranny intense. 

And hearty in its vehemence. 
As if my brother's pain and sorrow were my own. 

O Freedom! if to me belong 
Nor mighty Milton's gift divine. 

Nor Marvell's wit and graceful song. 

Still with a love as deep and strong 
As theirs, I lay, hke them, my best gifts on thy shrine! 

The New England Quaker, confessing that he could not 
achieve poetry, has in the act of confession made a beautiful 
poem, sound in stanzaic structure, and not unmelodious, 
Whittier compels admiration in spite of the undeniable crudi- 
ties of his lyre, crudities that he so charmingly acknowledged. 
Spontaneity, sincerity, passion, these are his high gifts; they 
triumph over all his verbal difficulties. They lift him not 
among the great poets, whose company he humbly knew he 
could not join, but among the genuine poets, who have said 
their heart in English words, who are true to the earth 
though they do not rise upon the earth-spurning wings 
of absolute song. Whittier's earliest inspiration was the 
anti-slavery fervour, and of this passion, the tensest, 
most noble, that swept over New England and roused 



WHITTIER 113 

its dull muse to ecstasy, Whittier was the authentic lau- 
reate. 

It is impossible for a New Englander (even one who fancies 
himself a thoroughly emancipated modern) to detach Whit- 
tier's ruggedly heroic verses from the harsh soil of history, to 
see them except through the noon air of his pacific and serene 
personality. To hear his verses, as it were from his own lips, 
gives them double dramatic force. His shy Quaker voice is 
hoarse with rage, the lips of innocence are white with scorn. 
The casual reader of "Ichabod" might be unimpressed, for 
the verses are plain, ordinary, lighted by no flash of self- 
explanatory beauty. But when the poem is understood as 
the divine indignation of a benevolent Quaker at Webster's 
surrender to the slave power, it becomes incandescent, and 
one imagines that Webster, cynical politician who bent his 
shaggy brows histrionically upon his opponents, must have 
shrivelled beneath those lyric curses of naive righteousness. 
It is the devastating wrath of a peaceful man! Whether Whit- 
tier's blasting scorn affected Webster, who was a shrewdly 
dishonest actor upon a primitive stage of oratory, the poem 
and the poet's subsequent magnanimity are still profoundly 
impressive sixty years after the conflict. Poems on current 
events are as a rule ephemeral ; emotion that is strong enough 
to make such poems permanent is a mighty fact in litera- 
ture. In Whittier's occasional verses the vehicle of the emo- 
tion seems to have been heated by its very resistance to the 
idea. He is so intense in his meaning that his technically 
defective verses are not quite bad, certainly never ludicrous. 
Sometimes his fiery challenge dashes against the stubborn 



114 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

hardness of his words like the dissonance of swift water over 
rocks. For example the lines from "Toussaint L'Ouver- 
ture": 

To hear above his scar-worn back 
The heavy slave-whip's frequent crack. 

"Frequent" is a feebly mischosen word. But the two lines 
and the verses in which they are set are powerful. "The 
Slave Ships" is naively terrible. One stanza has the naked 
simphcity of genius: 

Red glowed the western waters — 

The setting sun was there. 
Scattering ahke on wave and cloud 

His fiery mesh of hair. 
Amidst a group of blindness 

A solitary eye 
Gazed from the burdened slaver's deck 

Into that burning sky. 

To make sure that the plain power of that and other stanzas 
is genuine poetic art, that we are not misled by the tragedy 
of the subject into ascribing to the verses more effect than is 
inwardly theirs, we have only to read the mild melodramatic 
poems which Longfellow dutifully contributed to the cause, 
verses unspontaneous, uninspired. The reader's patriotic 
sympathies cannot fill utterly bad verses with the breath of 
life. The noblest enthusiasm cannot flame in wholly un- 
poetic verse. All the earnest belief in the world will not 
forge poetry. The abundance of dead unremembered verses 
by others on the same themes that Whittier rushed into rough 



WHITTIER 115 

rhythms is proof of his individual genius. It may be that our 
knowledge of his seraphic gentleness throws into relief the 
Hebraic violence of his prophecies; it may be that the facts 
of biography lend adventitious merit to his poetry; but even 
so, the failure of other equally sincere enthusiasts, and 
his almost unfailing success in striking out some white 
hot lines in poem after poem on the same subject, ac- 
claim his genius when all temporal and historic prejudices 
are deducted. 

The difference between a good hymn and a bad hynm lies 
not in a difference of religious sincerity, and the reader's 
accessible emotions will be the same in both cases; the 
difference is in the psalmists' poetic powers. Even when 
denuded of their attendant circumstances and read by some- 
body not familiar with our national struggle, the follow- 
ing verses must surely stand out strong, like a speech of 
Lincoln's: 

Hoarse, horrible and strong, 
Rises to Heaven that agonizing cry. 
Filling the arches of the hollow sky. 

HOW LONG, O GOD, HOW LONG.? 

And these verses written "apropos of the adoption of 
Pinckney's resolutions" (prosaic words that send one to a 
handbook of history), hear how they ring ! 

Shall our New England stand erect no longer. 
But stoop in chains upon her downward way, 
Thicker to gather on her limbs and stronger 
Day after day.^ 



116 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Oh, no; me thinks from all her wild green mountains — 
From valleys where her slumbering fathers lie — 
From her blue rivers and her welUng fountains, 
And clear cold sky — 

From her rough coast, and isles, which hungry Ocean 
Gnaws with his surges — from the fisher's skiff, 
With white sail swaying to the billow's motion 
Round rock and cliff — 

From the free fireside of her unbought farmer — 
From her free labourer at his loom and wheel — 
From the brown smith-shop, where, beneath the hammer. 
Rings the red steel — 

From each and all, if God hath not forsake 
Our land and left us to an evil choice. 
Loud as a summer thunderbolt shall waken 
A people's voice. 

Most of the singers of liberty in America have been be- 
neath their task. Their eagle has been a "property" eagle 
(the sordid pun happens to be tragically true), and their flag 
has been a painted cloth, a crude bunting which Congressmen 
are wont to spatter with words. Whitman and Whit tier, 
each in his own sincere tones, have spoken with the au- 
thentic voice of liberty and spoken many times during long 
lives. Lowell's muse uttered liberty once or twice, but his 
democracy was literary and not instinctive. Emerson, who 
held a lyre crude as Whittier's in a highly cultivated hand, 
sang twice or thrice in ringing tones of rebellion. Whittier, 
shy and gentle, nurtured in a childlike faith and untrained, 
unperplexed by culture, sends the tones of his trumpet across 



WHITTIER 117 

the world, to England, the arch-hypocrite mouthing liberty 
and defending slavery, and to the Pope, vicar of the prince 
of peace entangled in cowardly and murderous politics. 
While American statesmen. North and South, play their 
cunningly stupid games, and the agitators hurl indignant 
rhetoric, and the respectable proslavery Bostonians mob the 
orators, Whittier, cradled in an unwarlike creed, blazes forth 
in bellicose rebuke, strikes again and again at the smooth 
brow of evil with verses virile and aflame. His single pur- 
pose overwhelms the obstacles of his verbal hesitations. 
There is no mistaking him, even when the ear protests against 
his unintentional dissonances. Whether his work is poetry 
or rhymed propaganda, it is literature, for it expresses a man 
and events in words that are to-day alive with emotion. One 
who by temperament and by the habit of other reading feels 
himself out of sympathy with Whittier's hoarse verses has 
but to open his mind and present fresh surfaces to the impact 
of Whittier's intensity in order to be smitten by it. 

Whittier's religious verse is a mixture of banality and exal- 
tation. At its worst it is but the grotesque psaltery with 
which Protestant Christianity from Doctor Watts to Doctor 
Moody has offended the sensitive ear. At its best it is the 
passion of worship which transcends particular belief or doubt 
and imparts immediately the religion of the singer. "Laus 
Deo" is a moving song of adoration; its triumphant ecstasy is 
instantly contagious. His less inspired hymns are sweet and 
manly, in spite of their childishness, and now and again their 
childishness becomes rather a childlike simplicity which is 
near to poetry. 



118 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Of Whittier's narratives and ballads, some, like "The 
Witch's Daughter," are of good substance but unpoetic in 
expression. Others, like "Maud Miiller," are simply bad, 
as Whittier, with his mischievous modesty, was the first to 
admit. "Cassandra Southwick" is a good ballad; it has 
swing and rush and a lively pictorial effect. "Skipper 
Ireson's Ride" is excellent; it has the haunting ring of true 
balladry; it repeats itself over and over in the reader's ears; 
and whatever is of unforgettable rhythm, of a rhythm that 
carries and continually reminds one of the content, is 
true poetry. Chant this over once and it will stay in the 
memory: 

Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, 
Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart 
By the women of Marblehead. 

The best of poets is he who dreams something that the rest 
of mankind would never, never think of and makes it real — 
Dante, Shakespeare, Shelley. A lesser type of poet, but a 
genuine poet, is he who celebrates the actual land on which he 
lives, the daily scenes familiar to many eyes, the people among 
whom he moves. Whittier is the unrivalled portrayer of the 
New England landscape. Burden him with every disability 
that criticism can impute to a poet; unfrock him from the 
priesthood of perfect singers; reduce him to the plain common 
ground of minor poets, where he placed himself, the simplest, 
most undeluded common citizen in the democracy of letters; 
remember every gaucherie of which he is innocently guilty : he 
still keeps "on Yankee liills immortal sheep." 



WHITTIER 119 

His masterpiece is "Snow-Bound." The placid fidelity of 
the poem, the justice of the details, the apparently unsought 
felicity of the words identify it inevitably and forever 
with the experience of every one who has lived in New 
England. 

This page happens to be shaping itself in a New England 
farmhouse in January. The open wood fire is still burning, 
ably reinforced by steam coils. The wires are strung along 
the road for electric lights which will star the wintry darkness 
next year. The cosmopolitanism which has unified the world 
has reached to this corner of New England and softened 
the asperities of the ancestral character. The walls of 
a room near by, once filled with nasal hymns, give 
their mural ears to the strange magic of Debussy and 
Strauss. The intellectual atmosphere has changed, the 
people are different in many ways, some good, some 
bad; electric cars go by the door, and an abominable 
new house of green and brown shingles is an unlovely 
neighbour to this white house designed and built long 
ago by the village carpenters. Many aspects of the 
world out the window are unlike anything that Whittier 
saw. And yet "Snow-Bound" is true; it describes 
yonder landscape. The poem stands through all changes 
permanent as one of the granite boulders sheeted in 
snow. The fingers of life moulded the words. Through 
the plain verses actuahty said itself, and actuality is 
immortal. If one who had been brought up in a New 
England village should be stricken blind, "Snow- 
Bound" would give him eyes again for all that Whit- 



120 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

tier describes. The rustic muse of the poem is like the 
mother at the hearth 

P Recalling in her fitting phrase, 

So rich and picturesque and free, 
(The common unrhymed poetry 
Of simple life and country ways). 
The story of her early days. 

The sketches of character are good portraits, not too 
highly praised when they are compared to Chaucer's Pro- 
logue; the faces are aUve and ruddy in the firelight, homely- 
beautiful like "Flemish pictures" (Whittier's own just 
analogy) — the father, a "prompt, decisive man," the uncle 
"innocent of books," and the aunt — was ever more charm- 
ing tribute to the elderly maiden? 

The morning dew, that dried so soon 
With others, glistened at her noon; 
Through years of toil and soil and care. 
From glossy tress to thin gray hair, 

AU un profaned she held apart 

The virgin fancies of the heart. 

Then the sister 

Keeping with many a light disguise 
The secret of self-sacrifice. 

And the strongest portrait of all (strange that Whittier of all 
men could draw it so richly!), is that of the cultivated pas- 
sionate woman; 

A certain pardlike, treacherous grace 
Swayed the hthe limbs and dropped the lash. 



WHITTIER 121 

Lent the white teeth the dazzHng flash, 
And under low brows, black with night. 
Rayed out at times a dangerous light; 

A woman tropical, intense. 

Whittier's art is restricted. He never achieved the final 
majesties of the grand style. But within his limits he is 
genuinely good. His verse lacks some of the virtues, and by 
compensation it is free from some of the vices, of his uni- 
versity-bred contemporaries, who wrote so often with the 
pens of the ages that they did not learn firmly to grasp their 
own. ^Vllittier's poems are indigenous to the soil as lilacs 
and elm trees, and they are also the voice of a very great 
man. Through a medium which he did not fully master, he 
did manage to convey with power and vividness his fiery con- 
victions, blazes of passion across the blue serenity of his 
faith. With the sureness that plain simple vision gives to an 
imperfect draughtsman, he made pictures of his landscape 
that are unsurpassed, if not unsurpassable. If the day 
comes when they are no longer enjoyed, on that day the last 
Yankee will have died. 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

John Greenleaf Wtittier was born at Haverhill, Massa- 
chusetts, December 17, 1807. He died at Hampton Falls, 
New Hampshire, September 7, 1892. His schooling was 
imperfect and his Quaker-Puritan father did not approve 
his addiction to verse. He read some poetry, notably Burns, 
and his sister secretly sent his early rhymes to the Newbury- 



122 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

port Free Press, edited by William Lloyd Garrison. This 
opened his career as poet and journalist. He became editor of 
The Haverhill Gazette and The New England Magazine. His 
newspaper work brought him into practical relations with 
politics, and he might have gone to Congress; but he refused. 
He was a capable, sane worker for the cause of Abolition, was 
attacked by respectable mobs and met them bravely. He 
went to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1835. In 1837 he 
went to Philadelphia to work on The Pennsylvania Freeman. 
Thereafter he lived at Amesbury and Danvers, Massa- 
chusetts. He did not marry. 

His works are: Legends of New England, 1831; Moll 
Pitcher, 1832; Justice and Expediency, 1833; Mogg Megone, 
1836; Poems, 1837; Ballads, Anti-Slavery Poems, etc., 1838; 
Lays of My Home, 1843; The Stranger in Lowell, 1845; 
Supernaturalism in New England, 1847; Voices of Freedom, 
1849; Old Portraits and Modern Sketches, 1850; Songs of 
Labour, 1850; The Chapel of the Hermits, 1853; Literary 
Recreations and Miscellanies, 1854; The Panorama, 1856; 
Home Ballads, 1860; In War Time, 1863; National Lyrics, 
1865; Snow-Bound, 1866; The Tent on the Beach, 1867; 
Among the Hills, 1868; Miriam, 1870; The Pennsylvania 
PUgrim, 1872; Hazel Blossoms, 1874; Centennial Hymn, 
1876; The Vision of Echard, 1878; The King's Missive, 1881; 
The Bay of Seven Islands, 1883; Saint Gregory's Guest, 1886; 
At Sundown, 1892. 

The standard life of Whittier is by Samuel T. Pickard in 
two volumes. 



CHAPTER Vm 
POE 

No MAN more truly than Poe illustrates our conception of 
a poet as one who treads the cluttered ways of circumstance 
with his head in the clouds. Many another impoverished 
dreamer has dwelt in his thoughts, apart from the world's 
events. And of nearly all artists it is true that their lives 
are written in their works, and that the rest of the story 
concerns another almost negligible personahty. In the case 
of Poe the separation between spiritual affairs and temporal 
is unusually wide. His fragile verse is pitched above any 
landscape of fact; his tales contain only misty reflections of 
common experience; and the legendary personage which he 
has become is a creature inspired in other imaginations by his 
books, not a faithful portrait of the human being who lived 
in America between 1809 and 1849. The contrast between 
his aspirations and his earthly conditions, between the figure 
of romance he would fain have been and the man in authentic 
records stripped of myth and controversy, is pitiful, almost 
violent. 

This poet, with a taste for palaces and Edens, hved in 
sprawling cities that had not yet attempted magnificence. 
This bookish man, whom one envisages poring over quaint 
and curious volumes of forgotten lore, owned no wonderful 

123 



124 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

library, not even such a "working" collection as a literary 
man is supposed to require, but feasted on the miscellaneous 
riches that fell now and then upon the arid desk of the hack 
reviewer. This inventor of grotesque plots had no extra- 
ordinary adventures, none certainly that make thrilling 
anecdote. Capable of Chesterfieldian grace of style, and 
adept in the old-fashioned Southern flourish of manner, he 
left few "pohte" letters, and those few are undistinguished. 
To follow Poe's course by the guide of literary landmarks is 
to undertake a desolate journey. 

As his artistic self is apart from things, so it is apart from 
men. In his criticisms, it is true, he is found in open and 
somewhat controversial relations with the writers of his time 
and vicinity. As editor, he had dealings with the world of 
authors and journalists. But his acquaintance among the 
"literati" includes no man of letters who is now well re- 
membered, and implies no possibility of flashing exchange be- 
tween his imagination and another as brilliant. He never 
met his intellectual equal in the flesh, except Lowell, whom 
he saw only once. Irving in Sunnyside was not nearer than 
Irving in Spain. Not a friend was qualified to counsel or en- 
courage Poe in his work, not a neighbour in art was compe- 
tent to inspire him. He was the flower of no group of writers, 
but stands alone, original, aloof. 

The isolation of Poe from the best minds of his day is not 
well understood by those who have not a correct geographical 
conception of America in 1840. One of the most authorita- 
tive English reviews expressed surprise that a recent book on 
Boston omitted from the chapter devoted to litterateurs the 



POE 125 

name of Poe, who was born in Boston and was the finest of 
American poets. The intellectual life of the only Greater 
Boston that has produced literature was as remote from Poe 
as was Victorian London, and he was the only important 
critic in America who understood the relative magnitudes of 
those two centres of light. His caustic opinions about the 
Bostonians, which seem more discerning to us than they did 
to our New England fathers, are witness to his detachment 
from the only considerable movement in American literature 
of those dim "provincial" times. 

Whatever influence contemporaneous thought exerted on 
Poe came from books and not from men, not from experience 
with the world. Though a few reflections of his contacts 
with life, such as the English school in "William Wilson," are 
to be made out in his stories, and though in some of his essays 
a momentary admiration or hostiUty of a personal nature 
slipped a magnifying lens beneath his critical eye, yet the 
finger of circumstance is seldom on his pages, the echoes of 
human encounter are not heard in his art. 

The nature of Poe's disseverance from life is one of the 
strangest in the annals of unworldly men of books. He was 
not among those who, like Lamb, transfigure petty and dull 
experience, or those who combat suffering with blithe philos- 
ophies like Stevenson; he was not a wilful hermit; nor was 
he among those invalids who, in constrained seclusion, have 
leisure for artistry and contemplation. He was a practical 
editor in busy offices. He no doubt thought of himself, Mr, 
Poe, as urbane and cosmopolitan. He had knocked about 
the world a little. For a while he was in the army. He was 



126 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

effective and at ease upon the lecture platform. He medi- 
tated rash adventures in foreign lands until he apparently 
came to believe that he had really met with them. At his 
best, he was reserved and well bred, aware of his intellectual 
superiority. Sometimes, perhaps when he was most cast 
down and hard driven, he met the world with a jaunty man- 
of-the-world swagger. After he left the Allans, he was on the 
outskirts of social groups, high or low. His love for elegant 
society unfitted him for vagabondage. His lack of worldly 
success, if no other limitation, forbade his entering for more 
than a visit the circles of comfort and good breeding. But 
no matter what his mood or what his circumstance, it did not 
affect the quaUty of his work or the nature of his subjects. 
When he wrote he dropped the rest of himself. 

And, with respect to him, artistic biography may well fol- 
low his example, and documentary biography may confess its 
futility. No biographer thus far, not even Mr. Woodberry, 
has succeeded in making very interesting the narrative por- 
tions of Poe's career. It is a bare chronicle of neutral cir- 
cumstance, from which rises, the more wonderful, an achieve- 
ment of highly coloured romance, poetry of perfect, unac- 
countable originality, and criticism the most penetrating that 
any American writer has given us. 

Perhaps it is his criticism, with its air of maturity and well- 
pondered knowledge of all the literatures of the Orient and 
the Occident, which makes it seem the more singular that he 
owed nothing to universities and scholarly circles. The 
Allans took him to England when he was six years old and 
put him in a school where he learned, it is fair to suppose, the 



POE 127 

rudiments of the classics and French. He went one term to 
the University of Virginia, and a few months to West Point. 
Though the one institution was founded by Thomas Jef- 
ferson and the other by the United States Government, it is 
no very cynical irreverence to withliold from them gratitude 
on Poe's behalf. The most significant record of his life at 
"the University" is that which shows him browsing idly in 
the library. His most profitable occupation at West Point 
was writing lampoons of the instructors and preparing the 
volume of verses for which he collected subscriptions from 
his fellow cadets. He was not at either institution long 
enough to receive whatever of culture and instruction it had 
to offer. He was self-taught. He read poetry when he was 
young, and began forthwith to write it. As a military cadet 
he had precocious and arrogant critical opinions. At 
twenty-four he appears with a neat manuscript roll of short 
stories under his arm, which cause the judges of a humdrum 
magazine contest to start awake. 

From this time to the end he was a hard-working Jour- 
nalist and professional story-teller. He pursued his work 
through carking, persistent poverty, amid the distractions of 
inner restlessness and outward maladjustments. His pov- 
erty was not merited punishment for indolence or extrava- 
gance. He was industrious, and deserved a better wage than 
he received. He was not an obscure, unrecognized genius, 
waiting for posterity to discover him, but he "arrived" early 
and was popular in his own day. His books, however, had 
no great sale, for his pieces appeared in the magazines, some 
of them more than once, and the demand for his work was 



128 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

thus satisfied, to the profit of the magazine pubhshers rather 
than to the profit of the author. 

He lived laborious days and he lived in frugal style. 
He spent little money on himself, but handed his earnings to 
his mother-in-law. Whatever else was sinful in the sprees 
which have been over-elaborated in the chronicles, their ini- 
tial cost was not great. When he went into debt, the lust 
he hoped to gratify was the insane desire to found a good 
magazine. His wildest dissipation was the performance of 
mental jugglery for the applause that he craved. 

He spent weeks making good his challenge to the world to 
send him a cryptogram that he could not decipher. When 
he reviewed a book, he reviewed it, he examined it to the last 
rhetorical minutia. Griswold's opinion that "he was more 
remarkable as a dissector of sentences than as a commenter 
upon ideas," is a mean way of saying that he was a patient, 
sharp scrutinizer of workmanship. Mrs. Browning put it 
more generously when she said that Poe had so evidently 
read her poems as to be a wonder among critics. 

Poe had a mania for curious and unusual information. 
His knowledge was so incomplete and inaccurate that several 
critics in sixty years have discovered, with the aid of special- 
ists, that he lacked the thoroughness which is now habitual 
with all who undertake to write books. But Poe's knowledge, 
such as it was, implies much reading. And much reading 
and much writing are impossible to an idle, dissipated man. 

This clear-headed, fine-handed artist is present and ac- 
counted for at the author's desk. His hours off duty, abun- 
dantly and confusedly recorded, do not furnish essential 



POE 129 

matter for large books. If one without forewarning begins 
to read any life of Poe, one feels that a mystery is about to 
open. There seem to be clues to suppressed matters, sus- 
picious lacunae. The lives are written, like some novels, 
with hintful rows of stars. A shadowy path promises to lead 
to a misty mid-region of Weir. But Weir proves to be a 
place that Poe invented. He himself was the first foolish 
biographer of Poe. The "real" Poe (to take an invidious 
adjective from the titles of a modern kind of biography) is 
a simple, intelligible, and if one may dare to say it, a rather 
insignificant man. To make a hero or a villain of him is to 
write fiction. 

The craving for story has been at work demanding and 
producing such fiction. The raw materials were made in 
America and shipped to France for psychological manu- 
facture. The resulting figure is an irresponsible genius 
scribbling immortality under vinous inspiration, or turning 
neuropsychopathic rhymes. Before paranoia was discov- 
ered as a source of genius, wine received all the credit. 
But Poe could not write a line except when his head was clear 
and he was at the antipodes of hilarity. The warmth of 
Bohemia, boulevard mirth, however stimulating to the other 
mad bards of New York and Philadelphia, never fetched a 
song from him. He was a solemn, unconvivial, humourless 
man, who took no joy in his cups. If on occasion he found 
companions in riot, they were not cafe poets. Once, when the 
bottle was passing, and there were other poets present^ he so 
far forgot himself as to say that he had written one poem 
that would five ("The Raven"), but this expression of pride 



130 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

does not seem unduly bacchanalian. One could wish that 
the delights of stein-on-the-table friendship had been his. 
He needed friends and the happier sort of relaxation. But 
what record is there of the New York wits and journahsts 
visiting Fordham of an evening to indulge in book-talk and 
amicable liquor? The chaste dinners of the Saturday Club 
in Boston were ruddy festivals of mutual admiration com- 
pared with anything that Poe knew. 

The unromantic fact is that alcohol made Poe sick and he 
got no consolation from it. But before this fact was widely 
understood, long before there was talk of neuropsychology 
and hydrocephalus, when even starvation was not clearly 
reckoned with, it was known in America that Poe drank. 
This fact became involved with a tradition which has de- 
scended in direct line from Elizabethan puritanism to nine- 
teenth-century America. According to this tradition, poets 
who do nothing but write poetry are frivolous persons in- 
clined to frequent taverns. The New England poets, to be 
sure, were not revellers, but they were moral teachers as well 
as poets, and that redeemed them. The American, knowing 
them, saw Poe in contrast, as the Englishwoman in the thea- 
tre contrasted the rum of Cleopatra with "the 'ome life of 
our own dear Queen." And Poe, always unfortunate, offers 
a confirmatory half fact by beginning to die in a gutter in 
Baltimore — a fact about which Holmes, the physician, can 
make a not unkindly joke ! Besides, what can be expected 
of a poet who is said to have influenced French poets? We 
know what the French poets are, because they also wrote 
novels — or somebody with about the same name wrote them. 



POE 131 

Alas for Poe that, in addition to his other offences against 
respectabiUty, he should have got a French reputation and 
become, not only a son of Marlowe, but a son of Villon and 
brother of Verlaine.* 

And Poe, meanwhile, with these brilliant but somewhat 
defamatory reputations, lived, worked, and died in such in- 
tellectual solitude that Griswold could write immediately 
after his death that he left few friends. It is the unhappy 
truth. Those who promptly denied it, Graham and Willis, 
showed commendable good nature, but they were both in- 
capable of being Poe's friends in any warm sense. Whether 
they were at fault or Poe was at fault, the fact is that Poe 
distrusted the one and was contemptuous of the other. 

What writer besides Poe, what writer whose life is copi- 
ously recorded and who lived to have his work known in 
three nations, has left no chronicles of notable friendships.'* 
Think how the writers of England and France, with some 
exceptional outcasts, lived in circles of reciprocal admiration. 
Think how in New England the men of genius clustered to- 
gether, how even the shy and reserved Hawthorne was 
rescued from a solitude that might have been bad for the 
man and damaging to his work, by the consciousness that in 
Cambridge and Concord, in the rear of Fields's shop, were 



♦Colonel Higginson in his "Life of Longfellow" says that Poe "took 
captive the cultivated but morbid taste of the French public." The words 
"but morbid" are not only a singular indictment of France, but an imwitting 
indictment of America, for Poe took captive the American reading public 
before France heard of him. Let us deliver Poe's work, if we cannot deliver 
his life, from international controversy. But even his work, accepted, in- 
dividual, indisputable, classic, is troubled by another biographic folly — 
his debt to one Chivers. Chiverg could not write poetry. Poe could. The 
debt is evident. 



132 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

cultivated men who delighted to talk to him about his work 
and whose loyalty was gently critical and cherishing. Laf- 
cadio Hearn — who has been compared to Poe — had friends 
whom he could not alienate by any freak of temper. And 
those friends encouraged him to self-expression in private 
letter and work of art. 

Some such encouragement Poe received from J. P. Kennedy, 
a generous friend of young genius, and from the journalist, 
F. W. Thomas, whose admiration for Poe seems to have been 
affectionate and abiding. But among Poe's intimates were 
few large natures, few sound judgments to keep him up to 
his best. Long after his death he was honoured in Virginia 
as a local hero. The perfervid biography of him by Pro- 
fessor Harrison of the University of Virginia contrives to 
include all the great names and beautiful associations of the 
Old Dominion. But during his life Poe was not a favourite 
of the "best families" of Richmond. As well think of Burns 
as the child of cultivated Edinburgh, or of Whitman as the 
darling of Fifth Avenue. At the height of Poe's career in 
New York, between the appearance of "The Raven" and 
the time when poverty and illness claimed him irrecoverably, 
he appears as a lion in gatherings of the "literati." But, 
among them, his only affectionate friends were two or three 
women. 

To the intellectual man who has no stalwart friends, who 
consumes his strength in a daily struggle against poverty and 
burns out his heart in vain pride, there remains sometimes 
the refuge of a home warm with family loyalty, full of happy 
incentive to labour, in spite of misfortune, and able perhaps 



POE 133 

to cooperate with the genius of the household. Such refuge 
was not given to Poe. No man ever had a more cheerless 
place in which to set up his work-table. His wife was a child 
when he married her, and was still young when she died of 
consumption. His aunt and mother-in-law, who no doubt 
did her best with the few dollars which "Eddie" put into her 
hands, was an ignorant woman and probably had no idea 
what the careful rolls of manuscript were about, beyond the 
fact that they sometimes fetched a bit of money. Poe 
would have been excusable if he had sought and found outside 
his home some womanly consolation of a finer intellectual 
quality than his wife and aunt were able to offer. His writ- 
ings are graced with poetic feminine spirits, not unlike 
Balzac's early dreams of an angel woman, visions that sug- 
gest vaguely the kind of soul with which he would have liked 
to commune. But he never found such a soul. He made 
several hysterical quests after swans, but they turned out 
geese, if not to him, certainly to the modern eye that chances 
to fall on their own memorials of the pursuit. None was of 
distinguished mind, and all were either innocent or prudent. 
If Poe, with his Gascon eloquence and compelling eye, rushed 
the fortress of propriety, nothing serious came of the adven- 
ture and nothing serious remains — only trivial gossip, silly 
correspondence, and quite gratuitous defences. It is a Bar- 
mecide feast for hungry scandal. 

What has just been written may seem a negative and 
deprecating comment on Poe's story. But it gives truly, I 
believe, the drab setting in which his work gleams. And by 
depressing the high false lights that have been hung about his 



134 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

head, we make more salient the virtue that was properly his, 
the proud independence of mind, the fixity of artistic pur- 
pose, the will which governed his imagination and kept it 
steadily at work in a poor chamber of life, creating beautiful 
things. However much or little we admire Poe's work, we 
must understand as a fact in biography that, from the first 
tales with which he emerged from obscurity to the half- 
philosophical piece with which, the year before his death, he 
sought to capture the universe and astound its inhabitants, 
his writings are the product of an excellent brain actuated by 
the will to create. He was a finical craftsman, patient in 
revision. He did not sweep upward to the heights of elo- 
quence with blind, undirected power. He calculated effects. 
His delicate instrument did not operate itself while the 
engineer was absent or asleep. Deliberate, mathematical, 
alert, he marshalled his talents; and when he failed, which 
was seldom, he failed for lack of judgment, not for want of 
industry. 

To labour for an artistic result with cool precision while 
hunger and disease are in the workshop; to revise, always 
with new excellence, an old poem which is to be republished 
for the third or fourth time in a cheap journal; to make 
a manuscript scrupulously perfect to please one's self — for 
there is to be no extra loaf of bread as reward, the market is 
indifferent to the finer excellences — this is the accomplish- 
ment of a man with ideals and the will to realize them. Let 
the most vigorous of us write in a cold garret and decide 
whether, on moral grounds, our persistent driving of our 
faculties entitles us to praise. Let us be so hungry that we 



POE 135 

can write home with enthusiasm about the good breakfast 
in a bad New York boarding-house; and after it is all over 
let us imagine ourselves Ustening earthward from whatever 
limbo the moralists admit us to, and hearing a critic say that 
we have been untrue, not only to ourselves, but to our art. 
For so Dr. Goldwin Smith's ethical theory of art disposes of 
Poe, Poe who was never untrue to his art in his slenderest 
story, or lazy-minded in his least important criticism! 

This confident man, who will measure the stars with equal 
assurance by the visions of poetry and the mathematics of 
astronomy, and set forth the whole truth of the universe in 
even, compact sentences such as no man can make by acci- 
dent, lacks bedclothes to cover a dying wife — except the 
army overcoat which he had got at West Point sixteen 
years before. Says Trollope, the most self-possessed day- 
labourer in literature, "The doctor's vials and the ink-bottle 
held equal places in my mother's rooms. I have written 
many novels under many circumstances; but I doubt very 
much whether I could write one when my whole heart was 
by the bedside of a dying son. Her power of dividing herself 
into two parts, and keeping her intellect by itself, clear from 
the troubles of the world and fit for the duty it had to do, I 
never saw equalled. I do not think that the writing of a 
novel is the most difficult task which a man may be called 
upon to do; but it is a task that may be supposed to demand 
a spirit fairly at ease. The work of doing it with a troubled 
spirit killed Sir Walter Scott." Yes, and it helped to kill the 
self-reliant Balzac, a man of magnificent physique and ten- 
man-power brains, intended, as Gautier says, to be a cen- 



136 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

tenarian, but exhausted and dead at fifty with twenty novels 
still in his head. 

If Poe's work consisted of brilliant fragments, disconnected 
Coleridgean spurts of genius, the relation between his labours 
and his life, as it is erroneously conceived, would be easy to 
trace. His biography, if some things in it are underscored, 
furnishes reasons why his work should be ill-thought and 
confused; he has not been sufficiently credited with sturdy 
devotion to his task. That must be his merit as a man, and 
the ten volumes of his work established it. His tales may be 
"morbid," and his verses "very valueless." They required, 
to produce them, the sanest intelligence continuously applied. 

On Poe's uneventful and meagre life there has been built 
up an apocryphal character, the centre of controversies kept 
a whirl by as strange a combination of prejudices and non- 
literary interests as ever vexed an author's reputation. 
Some of the controversies he made himself and bequeathed 
to posterity, for he was a child of Hagar.* But the rest have 
been imposed on him by a world that loves art for talk's 
sake. Since he was a Virginian by adoption and in feeling, 
he has been tossed about in a belated sectionalism. South- 
erners have scented a conspiracy in New England to deprive 
him of his dues, even to keep him out of the Hall of Fame 
because he was not a Northerner ! Englishmen and French- 
men, far from the documents, have rescued his reputation 
from the neglect and miscomprehension of the savage nation 

*As late as 1895, fifty years after the event, Thomas Dunn English, writ- 
ing from the serenely uncontroversial atmosphere of the House of Repre- 
sentatives to Griswold's son, showed that he still regarded as a live issue a 
quarrel almost as comic as Whistler's quarrel with Ruskin, though far less 
witty. 



POE 137 

where he had the misfortune to be born, and in puUing him 
up they have tumbled over backward. Only a year or two 
ago Mrs. Weiss's "Home Life of Poe," a stupid but sincere 
book by the only living lady who knew Poe, threatened to 
become a matter of international contention. It was to 
certain British admirers of Poe the vicious, slanderous voice 
of America directed against her greatest genius. As has 
been said, the newest fashion in biography, the pathological, 
makes Poe a "star" case and further confuses the facts. 
Echoes of neuropathological criticism find their way to 
American Sunday papers, which serve Poe up as a fascinating 
disease, with melancholy portraits and ravens spreading 
tenebrous wings above the columns of type. It is certainly a 
mad world, and in it, even if he had been a trifle crazy, Poe 
would still have been conspicuous for his sanity! 

If Poe's spirit has not forgotten that in its earthly progress 
it perpetrated hoaxes, that it courted Byronic fame, that it 
advertised itself as an infant prodigy, that it made up adven- 
tures in Greece and France which its fleshly tenement did 
not, in point of fact, experience, that it took sardonic delight 
in mystifying the public, then it must see, in omniscient 
retrospect, a kind of grim justice in the game which the world 
is playing with its reputation. Nevertheless, it is unfitting 
that a man who did little worth remembering but write books, 
who lived in bleak alleys and dull places, should be haled up 
and down the main streets of gossip; that a poet who was, as 
one of his critics says, all head like a cherub, should be the 
subject of volumes and volumes which are concerned chiefly 
with his physical habits. 



138 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

The main reason for Poe's posthumous misfortune may 
well be examined, for an understanding of it is necessary to 
an understanding of any of the books about him; moreover, 
it lies at the very heart of the institution of biography. We 
have seen that Poe was a friendless man. Griswold so af- 
firmed just after Poe had departed, amid shadowy circum- 
stances, from a life that was none too bright to the eye of the 
moralist, nor clear to the eye of the world. And Griswold 
straightway proved his assertion, for he was by his own dec- 
laration not Poe's friend, yet he was, in accordance with 
Poe's wish, appointed biographer and editor of the collected 
works. A man not a friend and not in sympathy with the 
work was the only acquaintance Poe had to whom to entrust 
his Uterary fortunes after he was dead — in itself a desolate 
comment on Poe's life. There is no other relation in liter- 
ary history so strange, so unfortunate as this. 

Griswold was an editor and anthologist of no mean ability. 
Upon one of his collections of poetry — now an interesting 
museum of antiquity where archaeologists may study the 
literature of ancient America — Poe made acerbating, and 
no doubt discriminating, comments in a lecture. The report 
of the lecture angered Griswold. Poe's printed commen- 
tary is favourable, and we do not know just what he said in 
the lecture. He apologized to Griswold, for he was alert to 
the advantage of his own appearance in clusters of hterary 
lights which Griswold might assemble later. Once, after an 
absence from his office in Graham's Magazine, he returned to 
find Griswold at his desk. He resigned immediately, so the 
story goes, in one of his costly outbursts of pride. Yet he 



POE 139 

thought Griswold was his friend. He borrowed money from 
him, and when the year before his death, he left New York 
for Richmond, he wrote to Griswold appointing him hterary 
executor. Griswold's letter in which he accepted the office 
must have been friendly, for there is something like unwitting 
testimony on this point. When Poe read the letter in Rich- 
mond, a young girl, Susan Archer Weiss, was with him and 
noted that he was pleased. 

After Poe's death Griswold published a severe but not 
untrue article in the Tribune, the famous article signed "Lud- 
wig." Willis and Graham came to Poe's defence in good 
spirit. Griswold, rather piqued than chastened, prefixed 
to the third volume of Poe's work his memoir, since unneces- 
sarily suppressed. And long afterward appeared his letter 
to Mrs. Whitman, written just after the Tribune article. In 
that letter he says, "I was not his friend, nor was he mine." 
Therein lies Griswold's perfidy, and not in the memoir itself. 
For when, coming from one of the later lives of Poe, one turns 
in a heat of indignation to Griswold, one finds nothing very 
bad and little that is untrue. Griswold merely emphasized 
the wrong things, and in so doing he became a monster 
among biographers. Through him, the Muse of Biography 
violated one of the important laws of her dominion. This 
law prescribes that the best of a man's life shall, be told fully, 
and told first. 

When a man dies, his letters and papers are put into the 
hands of one who loves and admires him, or who at least has 
no reluctance to celebrate him. The work of the first biog- 
rapher is thrown to the world, where it undergoes scrutiny 



140 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

and correction. The mark of commentators in time turns it 
gray, but the original ground is white. The thousands of 
human stories together make a vast whiteness. In the midst 
of this background a black official portrait, even though the 
blackness be lines of fact, becomes a libel. The Devil's 
Advocate occupies the place where God's Advocate is ex- 
pected to speak. If the champion tells a dark tale, people 
think the truth must be darker still, for does not the cham- 
pion put the best possible face on his hero? Proper tone is 
impossible to restore. Injustice is done irrevocably. What 
the friend admits the world doubly affirms. 

The life-story that grows brighter with time is very rare. 
Joan of Arc is metamorphosed from a witch to a saint. 
Machiavelli is proved after centuries to have been not very 
"machiavellian." Bacon, another upholder of legal autoc- 
racy, is seen at last to have been a just and generous man, and 
not the figure which rising Puritanism made of him at the 
moment of his death and its triumph. But these are res- 
torations of characters that flourished before the age when 
official biographies are looked for within a year or two after 
a man's death. Of the recently dead we are not yet scientific 
enough to tell the whole truth. The rights of friendship are 
recognized, and its duties taken for granted. If its support 
is withdrawn, the structure is awry. One has only to remem- 
ber Henley's protest against Balfour's Stevenson, Purcell's 
life of Cardinal Manning, and Fronde's Carlyle, to be re- 
minded how strong is the obligation upon the friend, or the 
one holding the friend's office, not to emphasize the hero's 
blemishes. 



POE 141 

Yet Henley said nothing against Stevenson except that 
Balfour's portrait was too sugary to be a true image of a man. 
Purcell only showed that Manning played politics, disliked 
Newman, and was anxious about what posterity should think 
of him. Froude, so far as we can discover, now that we no 
longer make Carlyle an object of that kind of hero-worship 
which he thought was good for us, said nothing damaging at 
all. He only protested too much in his prefaces that he was 
doing the right thing to draw Carlyle as he was. Yet, as 
late as 1900, I heard an editor of Carlyle say that Froude had 
blackened the Maister. 

Such men as Carlyle and Stevenson and Manning settle 
back amid any biographic disturbance. They knock ma- 
licious or incompetent biographers off their feet, and burst 
the covers of little books. It is the poor fellow with an un- 
heroic soul that the biographer can confine and distort. It 
is the man of a middling compound of virtue and sin who can 
be sent down for a half century of misrepresentation by the 
hand of a treacherous friend. Biography, especially when 
it deals with the artist who has no part in the quarrels of 
creeds and politics, is wont to bear its hero along "with his 
few faults shut up like dead flowerets." Griswold startles 
the peaceful traffic by turning and running against the cur- 
rent of convention. 

Later biographers have not served Poe by falling foul of 
Griswold. For he has the facts and is an able prosecuting 
attorney. And much harm has been done by emotional 
admirers of Poe who, as Mark Twain says of Dowden's 
Shelley, "hang a fact in the sky and squirt rainbows at it." 



142 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

The error of Griswold, and of Poe's defenders, is an error of 
spirit, the delusion that Griswold's "charges" are momen- 
tous. After Griswold the story of Poe becomes a weaving 
and tangling of very small threads of fact. Every succeeding 
biographer has to take his cue from a powerful man who can- 
not be disregarded; and each biographer, in order as a faithful 
chronicler to do his part to straighten the story out, must put 
rubbish in his book. Even Mr. Woodberry, whose life is 
incomparably the best, shows the constraint imposed on him 
by wearisome problems, and loses his accustomed vitality and 
his essential literary enthusiasm. 

It is too much to hope that the nebular Poe will be dis- 
pelled and the Poe of controversy be laid. Perhaps one 
should not hope for this, because it may be that, even as the 
Shakespeare myth is a necessary concomitant of the poet's 
greatness, the mythic Poe is a measure of his fame, and to 
attempt to destroy it may have the undesirable effect of 
seeming to behttle Poe. Nevertheless, in an age of grown-up 
judgments, it is time to cease confounding his magnificent 
fame with petty inquisitions and rhetorical defences. If 
sudden cessation is impossible, we can at least hope that more 
and more the triviahties of his life may recede, and the su- 
preme triumph of his art stand forth unvexed and serene. 

Poe's first important publication was the little volume of 
1829, " Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems"; it is the 
birth of a star, set in the heavens secure amid the constellation 
where are Coleridge, Rossetti, Shelley, Mr. Yeats and some 
minor lyrists, perfect if not of first magnitude. Poe's poetry 
is akin to Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," and his theory of 



POE 143 

poetry is based upon Coleridge's. The theory, though Poe 
made much of it and though his essays on poetry are very 
fine, does not, obviously, account for his magic. Any one 
may have the theory — it is quite easy to understand. But 
that running of words into melodies so that they cease to be 
words and become song — that is the inexphcable act of 
genius. 

Falling in wreaths through many a startled star. 

The eternal voice of God is moving by, 
And the red winds are withering in the sky. 

Spirit! that dwellest where. 

In the deep sky. 
The terrible and fair 

In beauty vie! 

The sound of the rain 

Which leaps down to the flower. 
And dances again 

In the rhythm of the shower; 
The murmur that springs 
From the growing of grass 

Are the music of things. 

These lines, all from "Al Aaraaf," are to be matched only 
in Poe's other work, in the poetry of Shelley, of Coleridge, 
of the British pre-Raphaelites whom he inspired, and of others 
who dream among the stars- and hear words as they never 
sound in the common ear of day. Poe made only a few 
poems, and most of them are perfect — "Spirits of the 
Dead," "The City hi the Sea," "To Helen," "Israfel," "To 



144 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

One in Paradise," "The Haunted Palace," "The Conqueror 
Worm," "Dreamland," "For Annie," "A Dream Within a 
Dream," "Eldorado." To my ear these poems are finer than 
the more obvious metrifications of "The Raven," " Annabel 
Lee," "Ulalume," and "The Bells." Poe regarded "The 
Raven" as his best poem, and it is the most popular, but 
wonderful as it is, haunting as is its music and the music 
of "Ulalume," it seems to me that Poe is imitating Poe. 
Just so that other amazing master of a technique that no one 
else can handle, Swinburne, sometimes writes verse that is like 
himself but is not quite pure Swinburne; and Francis Thomp- 
son, sometimes in the very act of showing his mastery of odd 
and intricate forms, makes you stop listening and watch the 
verbal arrangements shape themselves on the page. This is 
a danger that Poe does not avoid; his virtuosity interrupts 
the song with something like an undertone of boasting, like De 
Pachmann at the piano. "The Raven" interests, but does not 
charm. However, Poe tells us that a good critique on a poem 
cannot be written by one who is no poet himself. Humbled 
by that rebuke, we can silently approve all his verse. There 
is very little of it; he attained the stars on a short flight of 
song; no other American pages contain so much beauty in so 
Uttle space. No other American poet has been so unani- 
mously accepted by all the poets of the world. There is no 
dissenting voice, not even the voice of Whitman, who ac- 
cepted Poe at last despite his lack of sympathy with 
Poe's demoniac blackness of spirit. Of those who are 
less than poets but read poetry, there may be some, not 
wholly consignable to outer darkness, who cannot 



POE 145 

respond to Poe. Unhappy people, they will be always 
shut out 

From the regions which 
Are Holy Land! 

Poe would have liked to give all his energy to poetry, but 
poetry does not boil the pot, and fortunately his versatile 
genius included a gift for writing tales. With his sure 
critical tact Poe estimated liis fiction correctly in the name 
he gave it: "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." They 
are fantastic, visionary, unearthly, intended to produce a 
mood, to send a frisson through the reader. Everything, 
the very colour of the words, is cunningly adapted to this 
purpose. Amid the varied powerful fictions of the nine- 
teenth century Poe's stories seem thin and not of first-rate 
importance. The great tragic novels and the deeply mov- 
ing short stories of our age not only overcast our emotions 
with shadows and give strange colouring to the world, but 
deal with human life and true passions; they are therefore 
more potent than the superficial grotesquery of Poe. His 
are flat designs, to be appreciated and enjoyed by the eye and 
the ear. At their best they are creepy and fascinating and 
subtle; they give an atmosphere of strange places and cU- 
mates not known to the weather bureau, but we have had 
so much mighty fiction since Poe that we are biases; we can 
read him all night without a shiver. The same thing, I 
think, is true of Stevenson's tales. I do not know if Steven- 
son was a great admirer of Poe, but he certainly lived in an 
era that had been strongly influenced by Poe and the French 



146 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

writers that followed him. It is a cool pleasure to watch 
Stevenson put Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde through their 
changes, and it is with clear intellectual delight that one 
reads "Markheim" and sees Death present himself as the 
last guest at the house of "Will o' the Mill"; whereas a 
story by Maupassant or Dostoievski, or even Dickens's 
highly inartistic and very great "Christmas Carol," leaves 
one aching. Mr. Poe and Mr. Stevenson do not overwhelm, 
nor does that other exquisite master of the eerie tale, Haw- 
thorne. Poe plays with psychological moods abstracted 
from experience and so wholly and deliberately of one tone 
that incredulity does not forget itself and unbar the gates to 
the inner passages of a reader's nature. Granting this limi- 
tation, nay, insisting on it as necessary to the full apprecia- 
tion of Poe's tales, one can then praise them unreservedly. 
"William Wilson," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Fall of the 
House of Usher" are quite perfect things. In his admirable 
criticism of Hawthorne, Poe defines the limits of the tale, 
and that means, of course, the limits which Poe intended or 
recognized in his own tales: 

"A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, 
he has not fashioned liis thoughts to accommodate his in- 
cidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain 
unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such 
incidents, he then combines such events, as may best aid him 
in estabUshing this preconceived effect. If his very initial 
sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he 
has failed in his first step." After that, if we read the first 
sentence of "The Fall of the House of Usher," we find Poe 



POE 147 

has let us into his secret — but none except Poe can make a 
Poesque tale. 

Poe has puzzled some readers who, taking too literally the 
addresses of other poets to the heavenly muses, have come 
to believe that a great artist is one who sits with a halo round 
his head, an amanuensis of some capricious deity who has 
chosen to fill him with inspiration. They think that because 
Poe talks of his methods with such jaunty assurance, with 
such an air of the prestidigitator who kindly shows the audi- 
ence how the last little trick was done, he is not truly in- 
spired, but is confessedly and peculiarly artificial. He is 
precisely as artificial as art always is. He has singular ability 
and willingness to turn one part of his mind upon the other 
and examine his own creative processes. This is the action 
of his critical faculty, which all great artists have, but which 
not all choose to put into essays on hterary technique. Poe 
is a great critic of himself and of others. Writing apropos 
of himself he becomes our first philosophic student of Hterary 
technique and aesthetics. Writing apropos of books which 
the day's work brings him to review, he becomes our first 
judicial and dogmatic critic. 

Whether Poe is "right" or "wrong" in his critical judg- 
ments is not important. He has something to say while he 
is sitting on the bench, and he expresses himself admirably. 
Never once does he write as if he had not considered what a 
particular book and the entire Hterature of the universe meant 
to him. Even in the course of the most trivial review he 
manages to suggest something valuable about literature. 
His judgments, except when he overpraises some perishable 



148 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

poetry whose author happens to stand in his good graces, are 
not so much wrong as vigorously diflFerent from those of 
other people. He was unlike any one that the American 
press had ever seen before; he was assertive, competent, and 
had a slashing disrespect and toplofty independence which 
seemed like a new sort of literary honesty. In one sense Poe 
is thoroughly independent and honest. He never expresses 
other people's opinions except when he agrees with them, 
and then he repeats them as his own; like many other in- 
tensely original men he is a shameless plagiarist, and he 
turns oflf ideas gathered from Coleridge and Macaulay with 
a divine assumption of discovery, which later critics (some of 
them incapable of any original idea) easily trace back to the 
source. 

Poe was a devoted servant of literature. He loved what 
is good. Some of his diamonds were paste, and one sus- 
pects that he knew it, that he was sometimes a trifle disin- 
genuous in "writing up" for the public, on whose suffrages 
his bread depended, the paste whose glitter the public likes. 
But on the whole he struck blows for what he liked. His 
critical papers which are of permanent value are his essays on 
the technique of poetry and his appreciations of Dickens, 
Hawthorne, Mrs. Browning, Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Lowell. 
His retort to LoweU is a bit of unguicular sparring, which it 
is stimulating to read now in a day of dull truce, when every 
well-bred critic is too pohte or too timid to say anything 
pugnacious. Lowell had shown his claws in his "Fable for 
Critics," and Poe in revenge caustically applies his acute 
sense of metre to Lowell's rattling impromptu. He had so 



POE 149 

much intellectual acumen that, although the gods had not 
made him a humourist, he could by sheer force of intellect 
write wittily — and write well, always well. His feeblest 
paper about the deepest buried celebrity among the "literati" 
is written by a man who understands the literary craft through 
and through. Criticism is valuable not in so far as it tells 
the truth and nothing but the truth about a book (for it can 
never do that), but in so far as it expresses an unusual, an 
individual mind; it reveals the critic rather than the thing 
criticised. When Mr. Henry James speaks of Poe's "very 
valueless verses," he tells nothing about the poet, because 
for half a century other people, including the unanimous com- 
pany of poets, the highest authorities, have found the verses 
very valuable. But he does tell us something about Mr. 
James's interesting mind; he confesses that his auditory 
system is defective. Similarly, the following passage from 
Mr. James's " Life of Hawthorne" explains Mr. James in some 
measure, but it does not explain Poe. 

"There was," says Mr. James, "but little literary criticism 
in the United States at the time Hawthorne's earlier works 
were published; but among the reviewers Edgar Poe perhaps 
held the scales the highest. He, at any rate, rattled them 
loudest, and pretended more than any one else to conduct the 
weighing process on scientific principles. Very remarkable 
was this process of Edgar Poe's and very extraordinary were 
his principles; but he had the advantage of being a man of 
genius and his intelligence was frequently great. His col- 
lection of critical sketches of the American writers flourishing 
in what M. Taine would call his milieu and moment is very 



150 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

curious and interesting reading, and it has one quality which 
ought to keep it from ever being completely forgotten. It is 
probably the most exquisite specimen of provincialism ever 
prepared for the edification of man. Poe's judgments are 
pretentious, spiteful, vulgar; but they contain a great deal of 
sense and discrimination as well, and here and there, some- 
times at frequent intervals, we find a phrase of happy insight 
imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry." 

Note how this latter-day critic tries to make Poe conform 
with the critic's prejudices and obsessions. In the first place, 
Poe is seldom pretentious, because he does not have to pre- 
tend; he is in full possession of a rare literary proficiency and 
has no occasion to be pretentious. In the second place, he is 
not vulgar, because he is a unique and original person, having 
Uttle in common with current, that is, vulgar, ideas and ways; 
the extraordinary can be objectionable, offensive, but it can- 
not be vulgar. Finally, consider Poe's collection of critical 
sketches as "the most exquisite specimen of provincialism 
ever prepared for the edification of man." Poe's collection 
is an accident of journalism; after his death the triviaUties of 
his day's work were assembled from the petty magazines. 
Let us compare the fist of persons criticised by Mr. Poe, an 
American poet enforced by circumstance to be a hack re- 
viewer, with the Ust of persons criticised in "Lives of the 
Poets" by the great Doctor Johnson, whom the booksellers 
hired to write introductions to poets whom they, not he, had 
chosen to reprint. Poe's list contains fifty-five names that 
mean nothing, and thirteen names still regarded as important. 
Johnson's list contains twenty-eight names no one of which 



POE 151 

suggests a line of verse to a fairly assiduous reader of British 
poetry, and the names of fifteen memorable poets. Poe's 
Welby, Mowatt, Hoyt, Bogart and the rest are no more ex- 
quisitely provincial than Johnson's Stepney, Duke, Yalden, 
Mallett and the others. The two lists, seen in the light 
not of a theory but of known historic facts, show that the 
preservation of nonentities in the immortal fluid of a great 
man's reputation is not a matter of provinciaUsm but of 
"diurnalism"; they are equal commentaries on the life of un- 
prosperous genius which has to turn its attention to obscure 
or insignificant persons, in obedience to popular demand. 
Johnson's booksellers make selections from two centuries of 
British poetry, for publication in dignified bound volumes. 
Poe pretends to be writing for a local magazine mostly about 
contemporaneous persons, late books of prose and verse. It 
is somewhat beside the point, but nevertheless worth saying, 
that the great Doctor Johnson does not know a poem when he 
sees one, that it is he who recommends to the booksellers the 
inclusion of Yalden, Pomfret, Blackmore and Watts; Poe's 
perception is instantaneous, and even when he is discoursing 
of a poetaster as dead and buried, as are most of Johnson's 
"poets," he says something fine and searching about the art 
of verse. However, the point is not to contrast Johnson's 
dense surdity with Poe's almost invariable sensitiveness, but 
to see Poe against his historical background and remember 
that he did not choose the "literati" to represent his idea of 
the best in literature. 

Poe's last work is "Eureka," a book that few have curiosity 
to read, and still fewer understand. It is a prose poem of 



152 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

great beauty, doubly interesting because it is not in the misty 
mood that one would expect of a poet, but is a piece of 
modern rationahsm. Poe saw the stars calmly and saw them 
cold and mathematical in their habits. He was so impressed 
with the finahty of his vision and his triumphant solution of 
the cosmos that he chose a title since rendered trite by com- 
mercial inventors. Like all other philosophers he failed to 
find the whole truth, and few responded to his cry of dis- 
covery, but he did something that should be better known in 
the history of nineteenth-century thought. He saw the 
universe as a material process; he, the dreamer of dreams, 
poetizes a scientific conception of the world without a 
trace of oriental superstition. Most other quasi-philosophic 
poetry of his time is alhed with German idealism and Chris- 
tian mysticism. Poe was the single voice of protest against 
transcendental cosmology. He was not in possession of all 
the available scientific knowledge of his day, but he was in 
accord with the spirit of scientific materiahsm. In this and 
in other respects he was akin to Shelley. These poets are 
better thinkers than prosaic thinkers are ready to acknowl- 
edge. Israfel, plucking his lyre in the sky, understands that 
the stars and all the songs that praise them are physical 
phenomena. 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Edgar (Allan) Poe was born in Boston, January 19, 1809. 
He died in Baltimore, October 7, 1849. His parents were 
actors. In 1811 he was adopted by John Allan. In 1815 
he was taken to England and sent to Manor House School, 



POE 153 

near London. In 1826 he went to the University of Vir- 
ginia, wliich he left because his foster father did not approve 
his conduct. In 1827 he enhsted in the United States Army. 
He was honourably discharged in 1829. In 1830 he entered 
West Point. The next year he was dismissed. The course 
of his life from 1831 to 1833 is obscure. In 1833 he received 
a prize of one hundred dollars for "A Ms. Found in a Bot- 
tle." In 1835 he was assistant editor of the Southern Liter- 
ary Messenger. In 1836 he married his cousin, Virginia 
Clemm. The next year he settled in Philadelphia. In 1839 
he was associate editor of the Gentleman's Magazine. In 
1841 he became editor of Graham's Magazine. In 1844 he 
moved to New York City and became assistant editor of 
the Evening Mirror. The next year he was manager of 
the Broadway Journal. Virginia Clemm Poe died in 1847. 
The last months of his hfe he spent in Richmond. 

His works are: Tamerlane and Other Poems, 1827; 
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, 1829; Poems, 1831; 
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838; The Conchologist's 
First Book, 1839; Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 
1840; The Raven and Other Poems, 1845; Tales, 1845; 
Eureka: A Prose Poem, 1848; The Literati (in Godey's 
Lady's Book, 1846), 1850; Collected Works, 1850. 

The best biography of Poe is that by George E. Wood- 
berry in two volumes, pubhshed in 1909, an amphfication of 
his "Life" in American Men of Letters. Only a reader who 
has laboured through many volumes of Poe biography can 
reaUze how sane and discriminative is Mr. Woodberry's 
early study. His extended work is final and wholly satis- 



^ 



154 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

factory. "The Life and Letters of Poe," by James A. Har- 
rison, contains much interesting matter, but it is floridly 
sentimental and ornate. Excellent essays are those by 
Emile Hennequin in "Ecrivaiixs Francises," and Mr. John 
M. Robertson in "Essays Toward a Critical Method." The 
introductory essay to Putnam's edition of Poe by Professor 
Charles F. Richardson is very good, as is also the essay by 
Andrew Lang in the edition of Poe's Poems published in 
London by Kegan, Paul Trench & Co. in 1883. French 
essays about Poe are numerous, many of them interesting 
and suggestive. 



CHAPTER IX 
HOLMES 

American literature is less strong in the mood of pas- 
sionate contemplation — the serenest mood of art — than 
in the mood of revolt, exhortation, divine discontent with some 
aspects of the world. The more powerful writers, Emerson, 
Thoreau, Whitman, Whittier, Mark Twain, are in opposition 
to things as they are; they are men of radical convictions, 
which they try to impress on the reader through satire, ser- 
mons, inspired journaUsm, intense occasional verse. I do not 
mean that the spirit of propaganda, aggressive beUef, is their 
only driving impulse, but the fire of the reformer is in them 
all; they are, each in his way, glorious cranks, and they are 
the most virile personalities in our literature. 

Holmes's views have been famihar for fifty years, and he 
now seems on the whole a witty, finely bred old gentleman, 
expressing over the teacups ideas that are mild and respect- 
able, certainly not dynamitical. It is to-day a Httle dif- 
ficult to reahze that he, too, was a revolter, that the first 
numbers of the Atlantic Monthly, made precious by "The 
Autocrat," encountered opposition among some of the con- 
ventional reUgious barbarians who were a dull majority in our 
free and independent country. Holmes is the unsuperstitious 
man of the world, the rationalist, the spokesman of what in 

155 



156 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

his time is radical science, protesting against the theological 
attitude toward life. His mind is inquisitive, discursive, 
fanciful, but very solidly sane. His manner is consciously 
well-bred, conciliatory, even elegant — a very innocent mask 
for some loaded guns that he fires while looking unconcern- 
edly at something else. Having inspected the world and 
found it out, he does not attack it at full cry like a reformer; 
but in perfectly modulated tones, in a voice twinkling with 
laughter, though seldom yielding to the full chest tones of 
mirth, he discourses urbanely of men and their ways. With- 
out quite knowing whence the shot came, the enemy has 
received a blow fairly amidships. Holmes touches pro- 
fundities with an assumption of amateurish inquiry, wliich 
with him is a method of humour, and not, as with Matthew 
Arnold, a dodging, unconvincing modesty. 

Because of Holmes's rationalism and urbanity, and also be- 
cause his verse has a carven finish and intellectual glitter, 
he has been often referred to the eighteenth century which is 
preeminent for its town-bred essayists and witty versifiers. 
His biographer, Mr. Morse, draws up a comic list of essay- 
ists to whom the Autocrat has been Hkened, and sagely con- 
cludes that Holmes is Holmes. The Autocrat is as Addi- 
sonian as any one cares to find him, or as much Hke Lamb as 
some one else cares to find him. But, after all, the essayist is 
a distinctive individual; indeed, his quahty as an essayist 
depends on his difference from other people. The essay is a 
rare form which few men have been able to make so well that 
their collected discourses are numbered among the great 
books of the world. Unlikely as it may seem, if one has not 



HOLMES 157 

thought of it before, English literature contains more good 
novels and poems than essays. It may be that the essayist's 
quality is rarely given to a man of letters; and it may be that 
the great literary imaginations arrive at success in the other 
forms of art, so that the essay is made up of the otherwise 
unused fragments of genius. The apparent superiority of 
the eighteenth century in the essay is in part due to the lack 
of wealth in the other forms of writing, just as a kind of clear, 
shapely, intellectual verse seems to be peculiar to the eigh- 
teenth century because there is in that age so little beautiful 
emotional poetry. The nineteenth-century essayists are 
really more numerous and greater than those of the eigh- 
teenth century, but they are not relatively so prominent be- 
cause they are surrounded by a varied profusion of genius of 
other types. Holmes is the single great discursive essayist 
that America has bound in its slender sheaf of literary har- 
vest. It is easy, but not profoundly critical to say, "Holmes 
— essayist, and witty poet — eighteenth century, noted for 
essays and witty poems — ah, yes, Holmes had a belated 
eighteenth-century mind." The truth is he was a very 
modem man, wholly of his time and place. In form, in 
substance he is no closer to the eighteenth century than is 
Emerson or Thoreau. In the topics he discusses, in the 
nervous eclectic variety of his mind, he is characteristic of 
his day and generation. 

It was Addison's ambition "to have it said of me that I 
have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools 
and colleges, to dwell at clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables 
and in coffee-houses." That expresses Addison even more 



158 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

perfectly than he realized, and not so flatteringly as he would 
have wished. He was an academic turned journalist. Seen 
across the splendour of the nineteenth century, the philos- 
ophy that he fetched out of colleges and libraries is jejune. 
Perfect in a narrow way, exquisitely phrased, it is not a very 
rich body of matter which Addison delivered from obscurity 
to the limited light of a few prosperous breakfast tables. 
Addison and Steele are triflers, all the better in their way for 
being triflers. Holmes is a well-stored modern man. More- 
over his is a fore ward-looking, not a backward-looking mind. 
Despite all recent rapid changes of ideas and the silencing, if 
not the disappearance, of some prejudices that he attacked, 
he is closer to us than to any time before him. His old- 
fashioned garment is a dramatic costume, as was Lamb's. 
"The Autocrat" is a fresh, day-Ut, Ufe-lit book, tingling 
with present day issues, though we have lost the sense of stir 
wliich it made in the obdurate bosom of Galvanism. We do 
not recognize ourselves in the breakfast-eaters to whom Mr. 
Addison condescended so charmingly; indeed, it were better 
on some mornings to go back to bed if there were nothing 
more vital in the world than the Spectator brings. But the 
Autocrat is our neighbour. He, can keep one up at night. 
Here is a champion of our kind of thought, a spirited, though 
half-disguised controversialist, a believer in intellectual 
courage, in which our world, Holmes's Boston especially, is, at 
this advanced date, deplorably lacking. "You never need 
think you can turn over any old falsehood without a terrible 
squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that 
dwells under it." So speaks Doctor Holmes of Beacon Street, 



HOLMES 159 

our contemporary, though not the contemporary of the in- 
tellectual decadence of Beacon Street. "Do I think that 
the particular form of lying often seen in newspapers, under 
the title 'From Our Foreign Correspondent' does any harm? 
Why, no, I don't know that it does. I suppose it doesn't 
really deceive people any more than the 'Arabian Nights' or 
' Gulhver's Travels' do." There speaks our contemporary, 
though not the contemporary of the men who edited the 
newspapers that the boy brought this morning. 

The Autocrat came full-blooded and shapely of hmb from 
the brow of humour, a new form, a new manner. There is 
nothing hke it in the whole range of causerie. 

Master alike in speech and song 
Of Fame's great antiseptic, Style, 

You with the classic few belong. 

Who tempered wisdom with a smile. 

He belongs with the classic few, as Lowell says, because 
the classic is a man who does something that other classics 
have not done. He joins them by writing a book in his own 
way without too much regard for estabhshed immortals. 
"The Autocrat" is a new mode of essay, "every man his 
own Boswell." It pretends to be a record of talk, and there- 
by gains the privileges of talk without sacrificing the advan- 
tages of hterary phrasing when that is needed to put the 
thought in order. It is free from the rigours of the formal 
essay and secures a natural right to circle over the universe, 
ahghting when it will and soaring when it will. (Holmes's 
grotesque delicious image is "putting his straw in the bung 



160 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

of the universe.") The table-talkers, Selden, Hazlitt, Col- 
eridge have left fine fragments, epigrammatic, witty; sen- 
tentious, poetical, of the conversational man or rather of 
the monologuizing man. Holmes, with an instinctive dra- 
matic sense, favours a broader idea of human talk. He 
embodies himself in a variety of mouthpieces. The charac- 
ters aflFord him opportunity to say things that he really means 
but which a Brahman physician might not care to express 
propria voce. He enjoys in himself and others the habit of 
the human mind of jumping from topic to topic, and his 
table-talk form enables him to indulge the enjoyment. He 
drops with apparent casualness the conclusion of a life-long 
reflection on a pet idea, and then turns Ughtly to something 
else, so that the favourite thought does not betray how much 
the author thinks of it. Holmes was nearly fifty when he 
wrote "The Autocrat" and he had written httle prose before; 
he drew on the untouched treasures of a mind at vigorous 
maturity, stocked full of experience. 

It is from experience that he dips oftenest and deepest. 
He is a reader, an amateur of books, but not a bookish man. 
He dishked criticism and refused to become one of the At- 
lantic reviewers. His statistical enumeration of Emerson's 
multitudinous references to Hterature reveals rather respect- 
ful amusement than admiration. He lectured on the Eng- 
lish poets and was cordially applauded, but of this literary 
excursion nothing is remembered except the verses with 
which he concluded each discourse. Whenever he speaks of 
books, in "The Autocrat" or "The Professor," he speaks 
with unerring perspicacity and individuahty of judgment. 



HOLMES 161 

This single sentence in "The Professor" expresses Words- 
worth in a flash: "Read the sonnet, if you please; it is 
Wordsworth all over — trivial in subject, solemn in style, 
vivid in description, prolix in detail, true metaphysically, but 
immensely suggestive of 'imagination,' to use a mild term 
when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster." 
That is the sort of condensed criticism which one finds in 
Lamb's letters. The American essayists who were Holmes's 
friends, especially Lowell and Emerson, are buried in books. 
They are thick with allusions which send a reader often to 
the library, and that is part of their service as humanistSj 
diff users of culture. Holmes makes you close his book, 
with your finger between the pages, and let your fancy 
run on what he has been saying. He stands on his own 
feet thinking about life and does not sit on the shoulders 
of the literary giants of the ages. 

Yet few of his more bookish contemporaries, devoted to 
purely literary questions, write so well as he does; only Haw- 
thorne, of the New Englanders, equals him in unbroken 
perfection of style. Holmes is one of the masters of style 
in whose phrasing there is no technical flaw, no expression 
blurred and but loosely approximate to the thought. His 
prose and his verse are free from false verbal notes. There 
is in his work not one of those sentences that somehow get 
neglected in the practical business of making manuscript, 
and which suffer for the healing touch of proofreader or 
editor. This is the more remarkable in view of the range of 
Holmes's thought. He expresses a great many kinds of 
idea. (The very index to "The Autocrat" is a work of 



162 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

humour.) He leaps from witty fooling and whimsicalities 
to some puzzling problem of psychology which he fetches into 
the light of his transparent logical style; then with an instinc- 
tive avoidance of tedium and long explanation, he leaves 
the problem and passes to a bit of sentiment, often on a high 
plane of feeling, where he is equally sure and in command 
of the resources of language. For cross-play of whimsicality 
over restrained and honest pathos, you will look long iDefore 
you jBnd anything better than this from "My Hunt After the 
Captain." 

"In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I saw my 
Captain; there saw I him, even my firstborn, whom I had 
sought through many cities. 

"'How are you. Boy.?' 

"'How are you, Dad.^^' 

"Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed 
among us Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, decently 
disguising those natural impulses that made Joseph, the 
Prime Minister of Egypt, weep aloud so that the Egyp- 
tians and the house of Pharaoh heard — nay, which had 
once overcome his shaggy old uncle Esau so entirely that he 
fell on his brother's neck and cried like a baby in the presence 
of all the women. But the hidden cisterns of the soul may 
be filling fast with sweet tears, while the windows through 
which it looks are undimmed by a drop or a film of moist- 
ure." 

His thoughts on love in "The Professor" are beautiful, at 
once speculative and humane. He slips once or twice into 
the mists of poetical metaphysics (on the verge of the region 



HOLMES 163 

where Emerson wanders in his essay on Love), but comes 
swiftly back to the persons at the table. He seldom quite 
lets go his moorings in life. 

"The Autocrat" is the cream of a man's mind at fifty. 
Had he said the best that he had to say, and would the next 
book be a hmping sequel unable to keep the pace of its pre- 
decessor? There are those who find "The Professor" even 
better than "The Autocrat." Indeed it is a deepening and 
ripening of the Autocrat's method and quality of thought. 
The Professor argues a Httle more at length, moves more 
steadily in one subject, with less fantastic flitting, fewer 
wayward excursions in pursuit of lateral analogies. The old 
verve is there, with an admixture of a sharper satire. There 
is a reason why "The Autocrat" should have had a sequel. 
That gentle old fellow had, to his surprise, started some con- 
troversies by the fresh candour of his thoughts on Hfe and 
rehgion. These controversies suggested new ideas, but they 
were not for the Autocrat to take up; they would have been 
out of character. The Professor is the man to resume some 
of these argumentative ideas and press them home. The 
Professor, of course, is an avowedly learned man and accus- 
tomed to lecture, whereas the Autocrat is only an amateur 
talker. The Professor's bete noir is orthodoxy. He is an 
impartial critic of the various learned occupations; he shows 
that the theological attitude is not peculiar to theologians, 
and strikes hard at pseudo-science in his own realm of 
thought. 

"Little Boston" is an excellent character. His local pa- 
triotism, slightly caricatured, is a page from the Doctor's own 



164 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

book of life. That is a delightul way to express an idea, to 
let it run to overstatement in the talk of a character, and 
then shave it off and modify it in the true first person ! Iris 
is rather shadowy, a feminine vision for a wise middle-aged 
man to enwrap in gracious ideas. The "boy John" is a bit 
of low-comedy realism, wliich the Doctor has brought in for 
the express purpose of unseating himself when he gallops too 
long on a high horse. 

The book has a central idea (outside the story of Iris) ; its 
thesis is humanity in science and theology. It is an ultimate 
apology for the medical profession, doubly persuasive for its 
frank acknowledgment of weaknesses in the ^sculapian 
brotherhood. It pleads for and expresses the humanity of 
learning and is a shrewd antidote to pedantry, pseudo-science 
and reUgious buncome. One reason that "The Professor" 
seems to a young New Englander so tinglingly alive, so 
contemporaneous, is that the delusions it doughtily pulled 
to pieces still flourish; we need the book at least as much as 
our fathers needed it. 

"The Poet" and "Over the Teacups" are written in the 
Doctor's inimitable manner, or perhaps it would be fair to 
say in the manner that only Holmes could imitate. They 
suffer in comparison with himseff alone. The sources of 
good talk are by no means run dry, though the stream is a 
little thinner. Holmes is not one of those whom popu- 
larity induced to write too much. He lived a long life, and 
his complete works are but a modest dozen volumes. 

His success in portraying characters and making them 
talk in the true idioms of life encouraged him to write a novel. 



HOLMES 165 

"Elsie Venner" is an ingenious story, and it needs not to be 
said that it is well written; Holmes did not know how other- 
wise to write. But he had not the gifts of the genuine nov- 
elist. He might have discovered them in himself if he had 
begun to look for them at thirty instead of at fifty. The 
manager of "Elsie Venner" is the Professor; he shows 
through delightfully at times, in spite of the shivery tale. 
Perhaps we do not shiver now; for we have lived through 
Ibsen and other men of tragic genius, whose "problems" are 
more intense and harrowing than any idea of the Doctor's. 
"Elsie Venner" excites in us intellectual interest and gives 
the pleasure which a fine mind always offers even in some 
form of literature to which it is not best adapted. "The 
Guardian Angel," another tale strung on a curious thesis, 
is more delightful than "Elsie Venner." It is written in a 
lower key. If the Professor is stage manager of "Elsie Ven- 
ner," the director of "The Guardian Angel" is the Autocrat. 
The first half of the book, where the problems of the plot 
have not begun to close in and demand of the author a skill 
that he does not quite possess, is as full of wise fun as so 
many pages of the breakfast-table series. 

From the time when Holmes, at twenty-one, struck the 
public fancy with his stirring, boyish verses, "Old Iron- 
sides," he was known as a writer of occasional poetry; he is 
perhaps the most uniformly skilful and delightful maker of 
rhymes in commemoration of local events to be found in 
English Uterature. He was ambitious to be known as a 
poet, as is every man of letters who has tasted at all of the 
divinest spring. His verses are among the most graceful 



166 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

pages of "The Autocrat," and in their kind they are perfect. 
As he never wrote poor prose, so he never wrote bad poetry. 
And yet — he is not a poet of lofty rank. He is a neat ver- 
sifier of humour, sentiment, and friendship, fundamentally 
sincere and dexterous in touching his modest lyre. There 
are several such poets in the nineteenth century whom we 
could ill spare and whose volumes we thumb as often, per- 
haps, as the works of the great poets : for example, Gilbert, 
Hood, Praed, Thackeray, Locker-Lamson, Calverley. They 
are the pleasantest companions and they are very fine 
technical metrists. The great note they do not attempt. 
Holmes's most ambitious poem, the one which he was most 
eager to have remembered as poetry, is "The Chambered 
Nautilus." To me it seems an elaborated conceit, pretty but 
not moving. The best of his poems is "The Last Leaf," 
which touches with a fine tenderness, through a playfully 
turned stanza, the true pathos of age. "Wind-Clouds and 
Star Drifts," elevated in thought and well done in its way, is 
cold as prose. As the Poet at the Breakfast Table himself 
says of the verses: "They were evidently written honestly, 
and with feehng, and no doubt meant to be reverential." 
But the inexplicable inspiration never descended upon the 
Autocrat-Poet-Professor. The prose passage in "The Au- 
tocrat" about the sea and the mountains is essentially 
better poetry than any of Holmes's verse: 

"The sea remembers nothing. It is fehne. It hcks your 
feet; its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but it will 
crack your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the 
crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened. 



HOLMES 167 

The mountains give their lost children berries and water; 
the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die. The moun- 
tains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has 
a fascinating, treacherous intelligence. The mountains lie 
about hke huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look 
upon but safe to handle. The sea smoothes its silver scales 
until you cannot see their joints, but their shining is that of 
a snake's belly, after all. In deeper suggestiveness I find as 
great a difference. The sea drowns out humanity and time; 
it has no sympathy with either; for it belongs to eternity, and 
of that it sings its monotonous song for ever and ever." 

In the poetry of hght sentiment, of humour and sparkhng 
word-play Holmes is perfectly successful. He is the best 
po&sible maker of after-dinner verses. The spirit of college 
festivals and friendly reunions he caught and spun into 
cunning rhymes, not once but in fifty pieces. "The Deacon's 
Masterpiece" and "The Broomstick Train" possess that 
unquestionable merit wliich is settled once for all by the fact 
that no one else ever did anything hke them. The Brah- 
man Doctor had only one peer in the versifying of Yankee 
humour and that was his neighbour across the river, Mr. 
Hosea Biglow. 

Holmes belonged to the prosperous comfortable classes. 
He took very much to heart some of the problems of his 
time, the intellectual and religious problems. He was a 
very keen and advanced investigator of some questions of 
psychology, and no man ever phrased scientific knowledge 
more perspicuously for the layman. But hfe for him was 
easy, and he saw things from the sunny side of a clean street. 



168 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Lowell early accused him of indiflFerence to political and social 
reform, to which Holmes replied most winningly, half con- 
fessing the charge. He believed in good family, in the re- 
finements of wealth, and was an apologist of the privileged 
whom wealth and opportunity surround with the graces of 
life to which he was very sensitive. He looked with humor- 
ous but distant sympathy on any democratic idea that hap- 
pened to be current (and a good many queer forms of demo- 
cratic ideas were current), but he remained closely within the 
shelter of caste. His point of view is frankly New England, 
not broadly American, certainly not of a world-social scope. 
His attitude toward hfe is that of a gently satirical romantic. 
He does not understand reahsm in literature nor the social 
structure that at bottom unites, say, the Autocrat's land- 
lady with the ancestral advantage which the Autocrat thinks 
a young man ought to have. The individual specimen of 
human nature he inspects quizzically, affectionately. He 
writes for the few, not the many; he addresses those who can 
catch an idea as it flies. His odd combination of logic and 
fantasy makes his work a continuous dehght; the process of 
his thought as he unfolds it is fascinating, and he himself 
watches it with a dehghted sense of surprise. He is the most 
modest of egotists, and, except when he is attacking an enemy 
(always a generaHzed intellectual enemy, never a personal 
one), he suggests rather than asserts. His intellectual curi- 
osity warily eludes closed final statements; to him the uni- 
verse is going on all the time and was not concluded with 
the last remark that any of us hapi>ened to regard as ul- 
timate. Every imagination that meets his is stimulated to 



HOLMES 169 

go on thinking about a world that is so full of a number 
of things. 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massa- 
chusetts, August 29, 1809. He died in Boston, October 7, 
1894. He was graduated from Harvard in 1829 and studied 
medicine in Boston and Paris, In 1836 he began to practise 
medicine. From 1847 to 1882 he was professor of Anatomy 
at the Harvard Medical School. He made one or two origi- 
nal discoveries in medicine, one of which led him into con- 
troversy with older physicians; the Professor in the labo- 
ratory is almost as interesting as at the breakfast table, for he 
wields the same competent pen. Except for a visit to Europe 
in 1886, Holmes spent his long hfe in Boston and Beverley. 
In 1840 he married Ameha Lee Jackson. 

His chief works are: Poems, 1836; Homoeopathy and Its 
Kindred Delusions, 1842; Poems, 1846, 1849, 1850, 1862; 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 1858; The Professor 
at the Breakfast Table, 1860; Elsie Venner, 1861; Songs in 
Many Keys, 1861; Soundings from the Atlantic, 1863; 
Humorous Poems, 1865; The Guardian Angel, 1867; The 
Poet at the Breakfast Table, 1872; Songs of Many Seasons, 
1874; Memoir of Motley, 1878; The Iron Gate, 1880; Pages 
from an Old Volume of Life, 1883; Medical Essays, 1883; 
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1884; The New Portfoho, 1885-6; 
A Mortal Antipathy, 1885; Our Hundred Days in Europe, 
1887; Before the Curfew, 1888; Over the Teacups, 1890. 

The complete biography is "The Life and Letters of 



170 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Hdmes" by Mr. John Tyler Morse. Mr. S. M. Crothers 
has in preparation the volume on Holmes for the American 
Men of Letters Series. One can confidently recommend it in 
advance of publication, for Mr. Crothers is the most genial 
essayiet "discovered" and encouraged by the Atlantic 
Monthly since Lowell induced Holmes to write for the first 
number. 



CHAPTER X 
THOREAU 

When Thoreau died, Emerson wrote: "The country 
knows not yet, or in the least part how great a son it has 
lost." In fifty years the country, the world, has learned more 
of this great son. Friends and editors have assembled one 
by one the eleven volumes of the standard edition; and the 
recent publication of his complete journal indicates that 
there are readers who regard the least of his notes as worthy 
of preservation. The growing cult of the open air, the 
increasing host of amateur prodigals returning to nature, 
have given fresh vogue to his sketches of woods and waters. 
But, for all that, the man is not yet fully understood. 
Lowell's unsympathetic essay, product of a mind from which 
poetry and youth had evaporated, and of a social outlook 
grown conventionally decorous, has carried inevitable 
authority. Like Macaulay's essay on Bacon and Jeffrey's 
blundering miscomprehension of Wordsworth, it is an exam- 
ple of how one great reputation may for a period smother 
and distort another. Stevenson's popular essay, written 
in his half dramatic attitude of athletic good-cheer and 
arm-in-arm sympathy with a hooray-boy world, is based 
on a misconception of Thoreau's character and his message 
as a whole. It overemphasizes the gentle reservation with 

171 



172 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

which Emerson tempers his praise. Emerson in a few words 
sets forth the rounded integrity of Thoreau's work and 
personahty; in one place he makes a comment upon his 
fellow-philosopher's proneness to negation and opposition. 
The comment, in its place, is just to Thoreau and expresses 
Emerson's more inclusive amiability. Stevenson singles out 
from Emerson's total estimate the negative characteristic, and 
stiffens it into an anti-social asceticism which is not foreign to 
Thoreau's nature but is by no means its dominant quality. 

That original minds stand above the comprehension of 
mediocre minds of their own period and of later times 
is a fact observable everywhere in the history of the human 
intellect. More than that, some minds are not merely above 
the common herd; they are in advance of the best culture 
of their day and must await the intelligence of later genera- 
tions to give them full recognition. Emerson and Holmes 
were as comprehensible to their generation as to ours. 
Whitman and Thoreau were trail-blazers; they went before 
to survey regions where later comers find a broad highway. 
Thoreau's vision shot beyond the horizon which bounded 
and still bounds the sight even of that part of the world 
which fancies itself liberal and emancipated. 

"I am," says Thoreau, "a poet, a mystic and a transcen- 
dentalist." He was all that, and, moreover, he was an anar- 
chist. He was the one anarchist of great literary power 
in a nation of slavish conformity to legalism, where obedience 
to statute and maintenance of "order" are assiduously incul- 
cated as patriotic virtues by the social powers which profit 
from other peoples' docihty. "Walden" and "A Week on 



THOREAU 173 f 

/ 
the Concord and Merrimac Rivers" have been accepted * 

as classics. The essays on "Forest Trees" and "Wild 
Apples" were to be found in a school reader twenty -five 
years ago. But the ringing revolt of the essay on "Civil 
Disobedience" is still silenced under the thick respectability 
of our times. The ideas in it could not to-day be printed 
in the magazine which was for years owned by the publishers 
of Thoreau's complete works. Boston Back Bay would 
shiver! It would not do, really, to utter aloud Thoreau's 
ideas in a society whose leading university, Thoreau's alma 
mater, has recently ruled, "that the halls of the university 
shall not be open for persistent or systematic propaganda 
on contentious questions of contemporaneous social, eco- 
nomic, political or religious interests." That is, let the 
university offer fifty courses in philosophy, history and 
literature which is dead enough not to be dangerous to vested 
authority, but let it not take any part in philosophy, history, 
or literature which is in the making! The application of 
Thoreau's principles to the injustices of our present political 
and industrial life would be condemned as disloyally "un- 
American" in the community where he lived and which is 
now owned, body and soul, factory and college, by State 
Street. Thoreau's intellectual kinsmen are not there. For 
an adequate recognition of the value of Thoreau's challenge 
to authority one turns to no living New Englander, but to 
that other solitary and indignant moralist, Tolstoy. 

On the right of the individual to withhold his sanction 
of word and deed from a government by any minority or 
majority which is engaged in dishonest practices and enforces 



174 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

brutal laws, the American and the Russian philosopher are 
mainly in accord. Each says to government: "You may 
take me and break me because you are physically strong, 
but willing party to your legalized system of plunder and 
murder I will not be," The government against which 
Tolstoy rebelled is melodramatically barbarous, so that 
liberal minds all over the world find themselves in sympathy 
with him. It is easy to protest against tyranny on the other 
side of the planet. Thoreau's government (which is so like 
the present government of the United States that the change 
of a word or two, the insertion of modern instances, makes 
his essay as pertinent as if written yesterday) — Thoreau's 
government skulks behind the pacific mask of democracy; 
it deforms children, kills men and ruins women by common 
consent and not by the cossack forces of a picturesquely 
tyrannous Czar. The prosperous and so-called cultivated 
classes who manage for us our industrial, educational, liter- 
ary and religious affairs, hold up horrified hands at Russia, 
but naturally have no quarrel with the system of government 
at home which leaves them in peace and offers them a 
career of ease. Therefore in the gallery of ideas through 
which admiring American youth is conducted, Thoreau's 
portrait of government is discreetly turned to the wall. Hi^ 
nature books, his poetic notes on the seasons, are recom- 
mended to an ever-growing number of readers. The flaming 
eloquence of his social philosophy, the significance, the 
conclusion of his experiment in individualism, is ignored. 
We praise Tolstoy, even in cultivated Boston, but we remain 
unacquainted with our own spiritual liberator. 



THOREAU 175 

One difference between Tolstoy and Thoreau is vital, a 
difference in personal circumstances. Tolstoy was born a 
landed aristocrat. He struggled in vain to bring the conduct 
of his life into accord with his beliefs. He desired to be a 
workman, but could only dabble in manual toil. In spite 
of his attempt to renounce copyright, his world-famous 
fictions brought money to his family. Circumstances en- 
meshed him, and his titanic struggle to extricate himself 
entangled him more and more, and made him a tragic 
figure. His life came to an impotent conclusion; only death, 
as in some Greek tragedy, could restore dimity and moral 
consistency. Thoreau, on the other hand, was born poor; 
he remained a bachelor; he earned his Kving by productive 
labour; and thus he had the good fortune to be able to practise 
his philosophy. He was not directly, nor by any economic 
indirection, dependent for his bread on another man. Tol- 
stoy, an agonized prisoner in a wealth which he thought 
polluted him, may well have envied the Yankee pencil- 
whittler and land surveyor, a jack-of-all-trades and master 
of several, who did his honest day's work beside the common 
labourers of the world. The leisure which he spent in the 
company of sages, poets, and prophets, whose peer he was, 
he earned with his hands. He was spared the humihation 
of writing sermons on freedom in time won at the expense 
of some other man's freedom. 

"If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations,'' 
he says, "I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue 
them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off 
him first, that he may pursue his contemplations, too." 



176 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

One other difference between Tolstoy and Thoreau is 
essential; it springs from that primary difference in their 
social stations. Tolstoy groaned beneath the agony of a 
suffering world; he took upon himself the sins of his class. 
His long cry of pain, which the work of his last twenty 
years hurls at the duU ears of humanity, is unrelieved except 
by a sad, half-rationalized Christianity, confessedly uncon- 
sohng. He tortured himself with an almost morbid sense 
of responsibility for evils remote from his private duties, 
evils which he could not help. Thoreau, on the contrary, 
enjoyed life. "I came into this world," he says, "not 
chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, 
be it good or bad." When they put him in jail for refusing 
on principle to pay his poll tax (he had nothing on which 
to impose a property tax), he did not make a martyr of 
himself, but with his mouth slightly awry wrote five dryly 
humorous pages about "My Prisons," in which legal con- 
trivances are made to look not merely oppressive but ridicu- 
lous. He laughs at the jailer and oflScial, his neighbours in 
their attitudes as policeman and soldier. A man of humour, 
one might think, would be ashamed to appear on a street in 
Thoreau's town in blue uniform with a star on his breast, 
lest Thoreau emerge suddenly from the woods and contem- 
plate the insignia of authority with a faintly acid smile. 

Thoreau is not a theorist who argues himself into anar- 
chism by the routes of bookish reasoning. The philosophy 
of anarchism was not in his lifetime so highly developed, 
codified and rationalized as it is now; and it is doubtful if 
Thoreau would have had much patience with its elaborately 



THOREAU 177 

systematic arguments in support of an unsystematic conduct 
of life. "To speak practically and as a citizen," he says, 
"unlike those who call themselves no-govemment men, 
I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better 
government." He was no selfish opponent of the incon- 
veniences of society. The state might have his money if 
it used it for useful, or at worst, harmless enterprises, such 
as building roads. He was wilHng to conform with any 
peaceful nonsense or extravagance. "One cannot be too 
much on his guard . . . lest his action be biased by 
obstinacy or an undue regard for the opinions of men." 
He simply asked not to be made accessory to legalized crime. 
He had no disposition to reform the world, though he joined 
the abolitionists, lilce all decent New Englanders of all 
creeds and political principles. "The government does not 
concern me much, and I shall bestow the fewest possible 
thoughts on it." 

That was a fair and a practical attitude for a freeman 
in an agricultural nation like America sixty years ago, where 
he who had skill to work could get a living somehow. A 
complexly organized industrial system has since grown up 
in America, all the good land is occupied, or at least fenced 
with titles, and to-day even so capable a man as Thoreau 
would find it diflBcult to support himself in decency with a 
half day's work. Thoreau's views fitted his time and his 
community, Tolstoy, holding the same views, fifty years 
later, was trying to hark back to conditions that the world 
of production had outlived even in Russia. What Thoreau, 
the maker of pencils, would say to a modern pencil-factory 



178 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

where he, like other workmen, would have to apply for a 
job, or make no pencils, we can only guess, Yankee-wise. 
We guess that he would have understood it shrewdly and 
inspected its machinery with the eye of a born mechanic, 
and not have protested against it as his epigone, Tolstoy, 
protested against the advance of modern industry. 

With the great changes that have come in the relations 
between a workman and his tools, some of Thoreau's single- 
handed individuahsm has grown obsolete. So far forth 
as it concerns those practices of government and habits 
of society which have not appreciably altered or improved, 
it remains a much-needed word of rebellion. "How does it 
become a man to behave toward this American government 
to-day.? I cannot for an instant recognize that political 
organization as my government which is the slave's govern- 
ment also." For "black slave," which he mearhs, substitute 
"white slave" or "child labourer" and the sentence stands 
vividly pertinent to the blessed year 1912. "This people," 
he said, "must cease to make war on Mexico, though it cost 
them their existence as a people." Substitute "Philippines" 
for "Mexico," and the sentence is part of many an honest 
man's behef this morning. "The standing army," says 
Thoreau, "is only an arm of the standing government. The 
government itself, which is only the mode which the people 
have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused 
and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness 
the present Mexican War, the work of comparatively few 
individuals using the standing army as their tool." Was 
that written yesterday when, under pretence of preserving 



THOREAU 179 

law and order on the Mexican frontier, the financial powers 
in control of these United States, investors in Mexican 
"securities," sent an army of freeborn American soldiers 
to the Rio Grande? 

The entire essay on "Civil Disobedience" should be read 
by us timorous moderns to renerve us in time of abuse. We 
have, it seems, lost the art of speaking so eloquently and 
courageously, but we can make the most of a man who spoke 
for us sixty years ago and whose work it is respectable to 
quote, for he is an established New England classic. 

Thoreau was not concerned primarily with government, 
because he was so situated that he could turn his back on it 
and not suffer. In his time an independent man could enjoy 
liberty of utterance and occupation. Thoreau asked to be 
let alone, and he was let alone. Non-interference between 
him and the government was mutual and friendly, except 
when the tax-collector reached his official hand into the Con- 
cord woods and seized that distinguished poll, enumerated 
as H. D. Thoreau, occupation, surveyor. 

Thoreau's work is a long notebook of "surveyor's" jot- 
tings, a continuous journal, all autobiographic, some sections 
of which are assembled into essays. 

His first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac 
Rivers," consists of seven discursive essays on a multitude of 
subjects. There is rather more reflection upon literature 
and life in general than narrative of the week's experiences. 
This insurgent and original man, who lives near the heart 
of nature, who, like ^Vhitman, regards a woodchuck's hole 
as a cosmic fact, is a critic of literature, a reader of Eliza- 



180 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

bethan poets. In a later book, "Cape Cod," he recites the 
sonorities of Homer on the Yankee sands. In his first book 
he recites the beauties of nature rechning on the bosom of 
oriental religion and British poetry. 

On Saturday he paddles out on the river. The purling 
of the water, the echoes of civilization on the banks are 
vividly realized. But by Sunday morning the little stream 
has flowed into the vasty deeps of Hindoo and Greek phi- 
losophy, and when the Sabbath evening comes we have added 
nothing to our knowledge of local geography but have 
listened to one of the very best essays on books. The 
paragraphs on style form one of the most melodious of all 
discourses on the art of expression; Thoreau exemplifies 
the art he is explaining. Whoever enjoys the inconsistency 
of man may note that for ten pages, in the skilful cadences 
of a practised "scholar," Thoreau dwells on the merit of 
the brief word, the eloquence of unlettered men, the farmer's 
call to his team and other primitive, manly modes of speech. 
He pays his warmest tribute, however, not to the style of 
the Concord farmer, but to — Sir Walter Raleigh. 

"Sir Walter Raleigh might well be studied, if only for the 
excellence of his style, for he is remarkable in the midst 
of so many masters. There is a natural emphasis in his 
style, like a man's tread, and a breathing space between 
the sentences, which the best of modern writing does not 
furnish. His chapters are like English parks, or say rather 
like a Western forest, where the larger growth keeps down 
the underwood, and one may ride on horseback through 
the openings. All the distinguished writers of that period 



THOREAU 181 

possess a greater vigour and naturalness than the more 
modern — for it is allowed to slander our own time — and 
when we read a quotation from one of them in the midst of 
a modern author, we seem to have come suddenly upon a 
greener ground, a greater depth and strength of soil. It is 
as if a green bough were laid across the page, and we are 
refreshed as by the sight of fresh grass in midwinter or early 
spring. You have constantly the warrant of life and ex- 
perience in what you read. The little that is said is eked 
out by the impUcation of the much that was done. . . . 
The word which is best said came nearest to not being spoken 
at all, for it is cousin to a deed which the speaker could have 
better done. Nay, almost it must have taken the place of 
a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, 
so that the truest writer will be some captive knight, after 
all. And perhaps the Fates had some such design, when, 
having stored Raleigh so richly with the substance of life 
and experience, they made liim a fast prisoner, and compelled 
him to make his words his deeds and transfer to his expression 
the emphasis and sincerity of his action." 

Beautiful, fluent, and suggestive! But meanwhile what 
has become of our village anarchist, whom even the tax 
collector cannot make a captive knight, but who is paddling 
idly on a New England river — for a week? 

On Tuesday a fine description of daybreak from a moun- 
tain, an experience not of this week but of another year; on 
Wednesday a fine sermon on friendship; on Thursday the 
story of Hannah Dustan and her justifiably murderous 
exploit among the Indians, accompanied by a discourse on 



182 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

epic stories and history. On Friday "the wind blew steadily 
downstream, so that we kept our sails set, and lost not a 
moment of the forenoon by delays, but from early morning 
until noon were continually dropping downward. With our 
hands on the steering paddle, which was thrust deep into 
the river, or bending to the oar, which indeed we rarely 
relinquished, we felt each palpitation in the veins of our 
steed, and each impulse of the wings which drew us above. 
The current of our thoughts made as sudden bends as the 
river" — and so he steers into a fine discussion of Ossian, 
He returns into the current to glide past Tyngsboro and 
Chelmsford, "holding in one hand half a tart country apple 
pie" — thence back into a beautiful eddy of thought about 
poetry, and the week is ended — a leisurely week covering 
ages of human thought.* 

Of this interesting book, full of exquisite reflections and 
of as deep wisdom as ever came out of the universe by way 
of Concord, the author sold two hundred copies; the rest he 
took back from the printer and stored in a garret, a transac- 
tion which he records with unresentful dry humour. 

His next book, the only other which he lived to see in 
print, is "Walden," his masterpiece, a greater book than 
the "Week," of the same tone and texture, but informed by a 
more explicit unifying philosophy of life. It records his ac- 
1 tual experiment in individualism. It is alive with the reality 
of daily doings and is rounded to a higher reality, to one man's 

*Alcott said that this book was "Virgil, White of Selbourne and Izaak 
Walton and Yankee settler all in one." This is intended as high praise and 
does express the varied wealth of the book. But Alcott could not turn a 
lofty intention into words without getting something wrong. There is 
about as much of Virgil in Thoreau as there is of Seneca ! 



THOREAU 183 

complete view of the life worth living and the destiny of the 
race. Emerson, paying his frugal way by lecturing and 
writing, makes many observations about society and solitude, 
the place of the individual in nature, but he lives among 
men and does not know from experience the effect of abiding 
sole and self-dependent in the midst of an unpopulated wood. 
Thoreau, investigator and surveyor, tries solitude for two 
years, makes nature a laboratory, and brings back the record 
of his experiment. "Walden" is one of those whole, pro- 
found books in which the best of an author is distilled. In 
his two years by the pond Thoreau observed sharply what he 
could do with nature and what nature did to him; he pondered 
at leisure over what it all meant and made, not a collection 
of random jottings, but a summarized report. 

Thoreau does not, as some people imagine, argue the case 
for the wilderness as against the town; on the contrary he 
loves best the cultivated land with people on it. He merely 
uses the wilderness to try himself in; he goes where the nature 
ingredients are unmixed with other things, as an experi- 
menter in dietetics isolates his "food-squad" to increase 
human knowledge, not to please their palates. Thoreau 
tells what he lived for, how he lived, and thereby throws 
light on what humanity lives for. His attitude is neither 
modest nor magisterial; it is sometimes rather disdainful, 
his reflections on the life that his neighbours lead are often 
coolly contemptuous. But for the most part he is setting 
forth his life and makes his conclusions clear, without 
urging them upon the reader's acceptance. He probes into 
the economies of an unthinking prosperity like other radical 



184 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

philosophers; but whereas the sathic dissections of a Carlyle 
leave the world a ruin and the pieces not worth picking up, 
Thoreau builds a courageous and cheerfully remodelled hfe, 
practical for him at least, and though not to be foisted on the 
world like a reformer's nostrum, valuable to any neighbour 
who will read intelligently. "So I Uved," he seems to say; 
"so I believed; so I found out and realized my sense of hfe. 
Take it or leave it. My experience taught me that to build 
a fine house to hve in is less important than to build a good 
man to hve in it. If that is not a practical ideal, please 
examine my bean account and see if by your own dull bread- 
wiiming, cake-stealing standards of life, I did not prove myself 
a competent husbandman." 

Thoreau does not turn his back on responsibihties nor 
flaunt his idleness in the sweaty face of humanity; he is a 
conscientiously busy man, busy about his life and needs, 
and not unmindful of the needs of others; he holds his head 
up honestly, the equal of the thoughtless driven toiler, and is 
much his superior in the satisfaction of man's need for 
high meditation. The philosophy of "Walden" is near to 
the selfish self -culture of the unsocial Greek. States cannot 
be built on it any more than they can be built on Epictetus 
or on Plato's "Repubhc," but like them Thoreau stimulates 
the individual to examine himself and see where he stands 
in the midst of the solar system, to inquire what his activities 
amount to and what is the motive of them. 

There is more in "Walden" than philosophy and unsocial 
experiment in the business of making a living. It is full of 
the poetry of the open world, an "hypaethral" book, un- 



THOREAU 185 

roofed to the skies. The birds fly and sing and the trees 
bud. Sometimes they have their technical names, for 
Thoreau is too clever to know less about a thing he sees 
than does some commonplace naturahst of the schools; 
but a naturahst he avowedly is not. He says in his Journal 
that the Secretary of the Association for the Advancement 
of Science asked him to fill in the blanks of a circular letter 
by way of answering certain questions, "among which the 
most important one was, what branch of science I was espe- 
cially mterested in. ... I felt that it would be to 
make myseK a laughing stock of the scientific community 
to describe to them that branch of science which especially 
interests me, inasmuch as they do not believe in a science 
which deals with the higher law. . . . How absurd that 
though I probably stand as near to Nature as any of them, 
and am by constitution as good an observer as most, yet a 
true account of my relation to Nature should excite their 
ridicule only." Again he writes in the Journal: "Man 
cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, 
but with only the side of his eye. He must look through 
and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the 
head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone." 
Thoreau is, as he prayed to be, a "hunter of the beautiful." 
He is in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts 
of the field are at peace with him. He is a better naturahst 
than most men of literary imagination, and he has more 
imagination than most naturahsts. 

There are two kinds of mystics. One shrouds himself 
in his cloudy dreams, mistaking his murky vision for fact. 



186 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

The other, open-eyed and cheerful amid the sunlit world, 
feels himself near the heart of living things. The one is a 
theologian; the other is a poet. For all his interest in the 
hazier transcendentalists and his admiration for the stupen- 
dous absurdities of Swedenborg, Thoreau is less near to the 
religious mystic than to the nature poet of all times, and 
especially to Wordsworth. Thoreau's spirit is that of a 
poet, though his verses are not good, for he was wanting 
in "the decisive gift of lyrical expression," as Emerson says 
of Plato and might have said of himself. Like his contem- 
poraries, Thoreau misreads Nature as a collection of moral 
lessons, but he is not blind to her naked loveliness, and he 
finds her lessons not austere, but consoling. "Not by 
constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, 
but by abandonment and childhke mirthfulness. If you 
would know aught, be gay before it." 

Mystic and transcendentalist, he is not a foggy-minded 
dreamer with his head lost in vacant unrealities. He lived 
not ascetically, but heartily, and could have said on his 
deathbed like Hazhtt that he had had a happy life. He did 
not shrink from facts like some other poets who have fled 
stricken to the shadowy woods. He looked upon things 
courageously. But he had his private criteria of what was 
worth looking at. His quarrel with politicians is character- 
istic. He is contemptuous of them, not because they are 
engaged in sordid matters, not because they are "practical" 
(the sentimentalist's charge against them), but because they 
are not earnestly busy at the tasks they pretend to engage 
in. They are poor politicians. "They who have been bred 



THOREAU 167 

in the school of pohtics fail now and always to face the facts," 
he says. 

In his wonderful essay, "Life Without Principle," he says: 
"I have often been surprised when one has with confidence 
proposed to me, a grown man, to embark in some enterprise 
of his, as if I had absolutely nothing to do, my Ufe having 
been a complete failure hitherto. . . . No, no! I am not 
without employment at this stage of the voyage. To tell 
the truth, I saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, 
when I was a boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon 
as I came of age, I embarked." So he sailed, a clear-eyed 
steersman, content and confident as in the canoe which he 
paddled on Concord River, to that morrow — the concluding 
words of "Walden" — "which mere lapse of time can never 
make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness 
to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There 
is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning-star." 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachu- 
setts, July 12, 1817, and died there May 6, 1862. He gradu- 
ated at Harvard in 1837; in those days there was a fee 
of five dollars for the diploma, and Thoreau, who had an 
unusually good sense of values, refused to pay the price of the 
parchment. He spent the rest of his fife in and about Con- 
cord, whence he made excursions to Cape Cod, Maine, 
New Hampshire, Canada. He supported himself by teach- 
ing school, making lead-pencils, surveying and farming. 
He gave a few lectures and published two books. Emerson 



188 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

expresses his life in compact negations: "He was bred to no 
profession; he never married; he Hved alone; he never went to 
church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the 
state; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the 
use of tobacco; and though a naturalist he used neither 
gun nor rod." It should be added that he did not always 
live alone, for he Hved with Emerson a little while, paying 
his board by his labour. Emerson edited four of his posthu- 
mous volumes. 

His works are : A Week on the Concord and Merrimac 
Rivers, 1849; Walden, 1854; Excursions, 1863; The Maine 
Woods, 1864; Cape Cod, 1865; Letters, 1865; A Yankee in 
Canada, 1866; Early Spring in Massachusetts, 1881; Summer, 
1884; Winter, 1887; Autumn, 1892; Miscellanies, 1893; 
Journals, edited by Bradford Torrey, 1906. 

The life of Thoreau is written in his journals and letters 
with the admirable introductions by his friends, Emerson 
and Mr. F. B. Sanborn. The Life by his other friend, W. 
E. Channing, called "Thoreau: Poet-NaturaUst," is impor- 
tant but fatuous. A good English biography is that by H. 
A. Page (Dr. Alexander Japp), "Thoreau: His Life and 
Aim." Stevenson's essay in "Familiar Studies of Men 
and Books" is good Stevenson but poor Thoreau; and the 
paragraphs about the essay in the preface are just as good 
Stevenson but still worse Thoreau. Lowell's Essay is the 
work of an extraordinarily brilliant snob. See also the 
Life by H. S. Salt, and the Life by F. B. Sanborn in American 
Men of Letters. 



CHAPTER XI 

LOWELL 

There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to cUmb 
With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme; 
He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders. 
But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders; 
The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching 
Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching; 
His l>Te has some chords that would ring pretty well, 
But he'd rather by half make a drum of the shell. 
And rattle away till he's old as Methusalem, 
At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem. 

In this lampoon of himself in the clattering "Fable for 
Critics," Lowell confesses one of his defects, and he exhibits 
another — his verbal carelessness and lack of metrical 
finesse. He also displays very attractive virtues, genial 
willingness to apply his critical candour to his own talents, 
and freedom from the more solemn sort of literary pose. 
He began his career with some slight verses, smcere in thought 
and not unskilful, though technically stiff and hasty with 
the haste that betrays itself. He was moved, at least in 
his youth, by noble enthusiasms; he studied the poets 
ancient and modern with unfeigned ardour; he became a 
competent, even acute, analyst of the technique of poetry; 
his impulse to utter his feelings in song did not abate with 

189 



190 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

youth but continued all his life. Yet he wrote no perfect 
poem in classic EngUsh (if classic is the word to discriminate 
what is not in dialect); no poem of his sings itseK, flies on 
its own wings or, to use its own words, " maintains itself 
by virtue of a happy coalescence of matter and style." The 
v'^ old way of expressing his failure is to say that he was not a 
born poet, which explains nothing but suggests what is want- 
ing in the verse of a man who had most of the namable 
abilities and motives that make a poet. Life-long devotion 
to poetry, an unusually wide acquaintance with the resources 
of language, elevated thoughts and an intense desire to say 
them, all are his; the music simply does not happen. It is 
not the burden of his isms alone that keeps him on the lower 
paths of Parnassus. Milton, Coleridge, Shelley were heavily 
laden with intellectual theses. The glorious company of 
pre-RaphaeUtes often set up a lecture-stand in their aerie 
and engage Ln a bewildering babel of disputes on social, 
pohtical and aesthetic problems. Poets are thinkers and 
are not inferior to their prosaic brothers in their love of 
argument or the zeal with which they hug their opinions. 
A true poet can carry any intellectual burden and not be 
hindered by it. Lowell had no quality, no interest, no occu- 
pation, chosen or enforced, which might not be of real 
service to a poet; no pack of fardels bound him to earth. 
His disability was not a positive but a negative thing. 

He was profoundly ambitious; he took his work seriously 
and felt deeply what he had to say. In an early poem, 
"An Incident in a Railroad Car," he describes the effect 
of Burns on simple men. The poem rings true; it is free 



LOWELL 191 

from the sentimentalism of Bret Harte's poem on a similar 
subject, "Dickens in Camp." 

But better far it is to speak 

One simple word, which now and then 
Shall waken their free nature in the weak 

And friendless sons of men. 

To write some earnest verse or line. 
Which seeking not the praise of art. 

Shall make a clearer faith and manhood shine 
In the untutored heart. 

This is an excellent ideal, sincerely if not poetically said. 
It expresses what Whittier and Longfellow did in some 
measure accomplish. Lowell does not reach the untutored 
heart, nor does he satisfy readers whose private anthology 
is gathered from three centuries of English poetry. He did 
enjoy a degree of popularity that any poet might be proud 
of. His stirring piece, "The Present Crisis," was quoted 
by the liberal preachers and orators of the day; its fluent 
declamation adapts it to the impassioned eloquence of 
exhorters striving to rouse multitudes. "The Vision of Sir 
Launfal" became a "household" poem, and is still, perhaps 
not wisely, prescribed for reading in American secondary 
schools. The best of all his verse, except that in dialect, 
is the passage about Lincoln in the "Commemoration Ode"; 
it is so good that it ought to be great, but the light fades 
from it when it is put beside ^Vhitman's elegies. The Ode 
was written in a rush of inspiration which left Lowell 
exhausted, a true case of the poet's pouring his heart's blood 



192 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

(that is, his nervous energy) into his work. But it leaves 
at least one reader, who is eager to like it, almost cold. 
The metaphors shine, but do not glow. Lowell's strong, 
capricious intellect seems not to have guided firmly the 
flow of his emotion but to have intercepted it and diluted 
it with rhetoric and conceits. Some of his other high-pitched 
and sober verse, intended to be in the grand style and strong 
with the very effort to be poetry, is confused and perplexing. 
The metaphors are manufactured and inserted; they are not 
of one substance with the thought. "Turner's Old Teme- 
raire," which should have been a fine poem, ends* 

This shall the pleased eyes of our children see; 
For this the stars of God long even as we; 
Earth Hstens for his wings; the Fates 
Expectant lean; Faith cross-propt waits, 
And the tired waves of Thought's insurgent sea. 

That verse, with its teeth-gritting "Faith cross-propt 
waits," is like the unpoetic parts of Browning, the work of a 
capable intellect, pushing the words into place with great 
power, far above the capacity of the mere mediocre versifier, 
but not making poetry. The inevitable poem is so good 
that it cannot be made essentially better; it is great with 
its defects like Francis Thompson's unrevised "In No 
Strange Land." It is so good that it does not remind one 
of another poem which in its kind surpasses it. It becomes 
indispensable to the lover of poetry who once reads it, and 
nothing else will take its place. The themes of Lowell's 
poems in pure Enghsh are all sung better by some other 



LOWELL 193 

poet. In "Appledore," one cannot hear the sea as one 
hears it in Swinburne and Whitman. "The Washers of 
the Shroud" does not thrill with the ominous voice of War. 
It is intellectually interesting, and has, like much of Lowell's 
verse, every virtue but the virtue. "Hunger and Cold" is 
startling and virile, especially the beginning; it diminishes 
into mere stanza-making and you can hear the pen scratch. 
"Bibliolatres" has a good thought in it, a protest of the 
modern spirit against letter-bound creeds. 

Slowly the Bible of the race is writ. 
And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone; 

Each age, each kindred, adds a verse to it, 
Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan. 
While swings the sea, while mists the mountain shroud, 
While thunder's surges burst on cliflFs of cloud. 

Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit. 

Such pregnant verses have value. They rise eminent 
in the solid prose of life, but do not detach from it and become 
poetry. 

"Talent," says Lowell, "is that which is in a man's 
power; genius is that in whose power he is." This epigram 
belongs to a time when philosophic critics were wrestling 
with definitions, trying to mark the exact boundaries of 
talent and genius, wit and humour, imagination and fancy. 
It is a kind of philosophizing that we seem to have abandoned, 
partly because the men of the early nineteenth century 
handed down to us as a result of their labours a precise 
critical vocabulary, and partly because they left the disputes 



194 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

inconclusive and so taught us that they cannot be settled. 
That epigram is too sharp to be true, but it has truth in it, 
and it is applicable to Lowell's verse. He had poetic talent; 
the genius of poetry did not possess him. 

Lowell says that "a wise scepticism is the first attribute 
of a good critic." The scepticism which, with an honest 
wiUingness to be persuaded that Lowell is a poet, comes 
off still shaking its head, may not be wise and the critic 
may not be a good critic. But it is better than ungenuine 
praise; and high praise it is impossible to give to the verse 
that Lowell wrote in traditional literary English. There is, 
however, one portion of his poetry which completely over- 
comes scepticism and for which nothing but praise oan be 
spoken — "The Biglow Papers." They have no rivals. 
Custom has not staled them. Occasional poems, they have 
wings that Uft them above occasion to immortality. In 
them Lowell is possessed by his genius, by a genius that 
never visited any one else in the same shape. The dialect, 
artificial from the point of view of a philological naturalist, 
becomes Lowell's native speech. In it he can say anything, 
grotesque, scornful, flippant, deeply comic, pathetic, gay, 
blithely lyrical, melancholy. He is much more at ease in 
it than in the language of his library. "The Courtin'" is 
his best poem, and far from being "homely," it is as graceful 
as a "hahnsome" girl in a gingham apron. In "The 
Biglow Papers" all Lowell's metrical gymnastics, his jovial, 
crackhng wit, his passionate, manly convictions are brought 
into full play. He is dead in earnest and yet having a 
"good time." 



LOWELL 195 

So thoroughly is Lowell's whole self embodied in this 
form that having made the Mexican War series, he can, 
after fifteen years, mider the impulse of the Civil War, resume 
the vernacular lyre, and — a rare thing — make the sequel 
better than its predecessor. 

A New Englander can read "The Biglow Papers" aloud 
with hardly more consciousness that he is reading a dialect 
than an educated Scotsman (probably) feels in reading 
Burns. To say that it is a dialect that no people ever spoke 
is merely to say that New Englanders do not talk in verse. 
Neither would a Scotch farmer before Burns have said, 
"A woe-worn ghaist I hameward glide"; for that is the Idiom 
not of speech, but of literature reshaping a dialect. Biglow's 
turn of phrase falls familiar on the ear of one who knows 
New England farmers — farmers that did leave " the ax 
an' saw," "the anvil an' the plow," who believe that the 
best way to settle "is to settle an' not Jaw" — and then 
argue an hour to prove it. Lowell's enthusiasm for the 
dialect and his delight in the Yankee mixture of common 
sense and mystic nearness to God find expression in the essay 
which prefaces the collected works of Mr. Biglow and Parson 
Wilbur. Can the literature of philology show such a truly 
hterary and genuinely philological essay as Lowell's? He 
knows the subject as a scholar, and he feels it as a poet. 
The dialect is his most effective literary idiom; in it he can 
"let himself go," and he is freed from the weight of his 
bookishness. 

Contrast his expression in classic English and in Biglow's 
dialect of ideas nearly akin. The loss of his children moved 



196 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

him to write several poems, "She Came and Went," "The 
ChangeUng," and " The First Snowfall." He also wrote 
some verses on the death of a friend's child, and on the 
death of Agassiz. Lowell was too honest to write of his 
private emotions merely for the sake of making verses. 
Yet none of these poems is affecting in the way they intend 
to be. Indeed one dislikes to quote them, even to prove a 
point, because they produce a feeling of discomfort, of regret 
that a strong man, tragically meaning what he tries to say, 
should speak like a feeble sentimentalist. 

I had a little daughter 

And she was given to me 
To lead me gently backward 

To the Heavenly Father's knee. 

After the War, in which Lowell lost three nephews, Hosea 
Biglow sings his joy at the coming of peace and his sorrow 
for dead soldiers. 

Rat-tat-tattle thru the street 

I hear the drummers makin' riot. 
An' I set thinkin' o' the feet 

Thet foUered once an' now are quiet, — 
White feet ez snowdrops uuiercent, 

Thet never knowed the paths o' Satan, 
Whose comin' step ther' 's ears thet won't. 

No, not lifelong, leave oflf awaitin'. 

Why, hain't I held 'em on my kaee.'* 

Didn't I love to see 'em growin'. 
Three hkely lads ez wal could be, 

Hahnsome an' brave an' not tu knowin'? 



LOWELL 197 

I set an' look into the blaze 

Whose natur', jes' like theirn, keeps climbin', 
Ez long 'z it lives, in shinin' ways, 

An' half despise myself for rhymin'. 

Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth 

On War's red techstone rang true metal. 
Who ventered life an' love an' youth 

For the gret prize o' death in battle? — 
To him who, deadly hurt, agen 

Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, 
Tippin' with fire the bolt of men 

Thet rived the Rebel Une asunder? 

'Tain't right to hev the young go fust, 
All throbbin' full o' gifts an' graces, 

Leavin' life's paupers dry ez dust 

To try an' make b'lieve fill their places: 

Nothin' but tells us wut we miss, 

Ther' 's gaps our lives can't never fay in. 

An' thet world seems so fur from tliis 

Lef for us loafers to grow gray in! 

In the lighter, sharper moods of satire "The Biglow 
Papers" are so good that they are all quotable. The Peace 
Society might open oflSces next to our recruiting stations 
(with their mendacious posters of splendidly tailored officers) 
and distribute to inquiring youth the first effusion of Mr. 
Biglow: 

Thrash away, you'll hev to rattle 
On them kittle-drums o' yourn, — 

'Taint a knowin' kind o' cattle 
Thet is ketched with mouldy corn; 



198 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Put in stiflF, you fifer feller, 

Let folks see how spry you be, — 

Guess you'll toot till you are yeller 
Tore you git ahold o' me! 

Thet air flag's a leetle rotten, 

Hope it ain't your Sunday best; — 
Fact! it takes a sight o' cotton 

To stuff out a soger's chest: 
Sence we farmers hev to pay fer't, 

Ef you must wear humps like these, 
S'posin' you should try salt hay fer't. 

It would du ez slick ez grease. 

To our cowardly newspapers, which do not dare fight, 
or even mention, injustices at their own doors, because 
the owners of the papers or their financial allies make money 
out of the injustices, "The Pious Editor's Creed" is recom- 
mended. 

I du beheve in Freedom's cause, 

Ez fur away ez Payris is; 
I love to see her stick her claws 

In them infarnal Phayrisees; 
It's wal enough agin a king 

To dror resolves an' triggers, — 
But libbaty's a kind o' thing 

Thet don't agree with niggers. 

I du believe in special ways 

O' prayin' an' convartin'; 
The bread comes back in many days. 

An' buttered, tu, far sartin; 



LOWELL 199 

I mean in preyin' till one busts 

On wut the party chooses. 
An' in convartin' pubUe trusts 

To very privit uses. 

I du beheve in bein' this 

Or thet, ez it may happen 
One way or t' other hendiest is 

To ketch the people nappin'; 
It ain't by princerples nor men 

My preudent course is steadied, — 
I scent which pays the best, an' then 

Go into it baldheaded. 

"Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line" is a fine nature poem; 
the coming of spring is as fresh as Chaucer's April 

Gladness on wings, the bobolink, is here; 

Half hid in tip-top apple-blooms he swings. 

Or climbs aginst the breeze with quiverin' wings. 

Or givin' way to 't in a mock despair. 

Runs down, a brook o' laughter, thru the air. 

If Lowell, with his full, hearty sense of life and many 
gifts, did not write any book (except "The Biglow Papers") 
which takes its place surely among the classics, did he phrase 
the reason himself in these lines? 

Jes' so with poets: wut they've airly read 
Gits kind o' worked into their heart an' head, 
So's they can't seem to write but jest on sheers 
With furrin countries or played-out ideers. 
Nor hev a feelin', ef it doosn't smack 
O' wut some critter chose to feel 'way back. 



200 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Did not Lowell read too much? Did not his vigorous 
mind become smothered in more traditional ideas than it 
could assimilate and master? As he grows older he becomes 
distrustful of life. He does not lead, but follows, and 
sceptically, timidly opposes the newer movements, just as 
the older ideas which his youth welcomed were opposed 
by men whom he then, as a hot radical, despised. His mind 
seems to fill up too quickly and have no room left for any- 
thing that happened after the Civil War. He is afraid 
of evolution, clinging with a perverse sentimentality to pretty 
behefs that he has really outgrown. In waxing rigid with 
age he is not unlike other men; many of his contemporaries 
seem to have been stunned, tired out, by the issues of the 
Civil War, unable to take up thoughts not already in their 
blood. By the time he is fifty, all Lowell's interest is in 
ideas that have already ripened and partly decayed. And 
the reason, with him, over and above the conservatism 
natural to graying maturity, is that he fed himself too richly 
on things in old books. 

His biography portrays him hurrying home from lectures, 
half ironically congratulating himseK for having overcome 
his indolence and "done a day's work," then incontinently 
sinking into his armchair and reading till midnight. He 
had a capacious and hospitable mind. He boasted that 
in 1860 he was one of the few cultivated Bostonians who 
appreciated Lincoln and foresaw his emerging greatness. 
Twenty years later he is looking at life with the shrug of 
the mere literary man; he has degenerated into a polite 
conservative statesman, intelligent, honest, but no longer 



LOWELL 201 

alive to the best and bravest ideas of the Ufe about him. 
He buried himself in the past. His mind was crammed with 
literature, that is, with the expressions of outworn states 
of society, and even his large nature had no room for any 
thing fresh from life. Literature is a food and a stimulant 
up to a certain point. Beyond that it becomes a drug. 
By thirty-five or forty a creative Uterary intellect should 
have taken its necessary nutriment from the classics; after 
that much reading maketh not a full man, but a library 
man. Lowell's essay on Lincoln, written in 1864, when people 
needed to be told what we know now but few knew then, 
is a greater contribution to literature, to the life of humanity, 
than essays on Dante and Chaucer. One is jealous in behalf 
of real literature at the surrender of such a splendid mind 
as Lowell's to the inferior work, the secondary work, of study- 
ing books. That work, which is necessary and requires 
talent, can be well enough done by men who could not write 
"The Biglow Papers" or the essay on Lincoln. Moreover, 
less reading, the study of fewer men, would not have hurt 
his bookish essays, but might have improved them. He 
quotes too much directly and indirectly; transfers to his 
pages in too great abundance, and to the disturbance of order, 
the marked passages in his beloved library. 

Lowell's submersion in books was, to be sure, not motived 
entirely by the sin of indolence and willingness to let other 
men determine the course of his thought; he was devoted 
to great thinkers, and his devotion is more than justified by 
the work he did as a teacher and critic. In company with 
Longfellow, Emerson, and others of the New England Illumi- 



202 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

nati, he introduced modern literature into a cultivated 
society that had hitherto depended wholly on the ancient 
classics — the classics parsed and parsonified, to put it 
in a Lowellian manner. His address delivered before the 
Modern Language Association is a sort of intellectual auto- 
biography, a confession of faith and apologia pro, vita sua. 
The man who objected to the stuffed nightingales and Eng- 
hsh Aprils in American poetry was the man who swamped 
himself and others in floods of European literature. It 
was a true service, which we might easily underestimate 
to-day when the literature of every country is exported to 
every other as fast as it comes from the press. When 
Lowell opened the old French Romances he found virgin 
pages; the gilt and marbhng on the tops of the books stuck 
the leaves together. With his characteristic skill in finding 
just the right quotation to express it, he says: 

I was the first who ever burst 
Into that silent sea. 

He was a discoverer, and his critical essays tingle with 
the fervour of discovery. To-day our poor professors are 
driven to despair trying to keep up with the "literature" 
of their subjects, which is not literature at all; and they look 
at you wistfully, enviously, if you happen to talk about 
some great modern things which they, teachers of hterature, 
have not time for! Lowell made his reading fruitful for 
other men. Therefore he is a true critic. He did his work 
at a time when it was greatly needed. Yet one cannot 
help thinking that he was reading other men's work when 



LOWELL 203 

he ought to have been rewriting his own, that another poem 
as good as "The Courtin'," and better versions of many of 
his other poems got lost in the hbrary where there was so 
much French Romance and Dante and Chaucer. One 
poem is worth fifty criticisms. Arnold's lovely poem, 
"The Buried Life," is more precious than all his talks about 
the Function of Criticism and Hellenism. 

Lowell's position was unique. He was the sole authentic 
literary advocate and discoverer in New England and had 
no competitors near his throne. Longfellow, also a dis- 
coverer and advocate, did not write criticisms. Lowell's 
autocratic privileges fostered the merits of his prose, its 
humanity, audacity, colloquial ease; and it also aggravated 
his defects, his amateurish, capricious irresponsibihty, which 
his finer-tempered friend, Norton, and his more learned 
friend, Cliild, could not chasten, if they ever tried to. He 
could give his judgments without any feeling that there 
was a law hbrary at his back or any other competent lawyer 
in the court room. On the whole this condition was rather 
for than against the kind of excellence of which he was 
capable; he needed elbow room and a wilful laxity of method. 
Circumstances encouraged him to be an amateur in the best 
sense of the word, reading for fun, hke Lamb, not worried 
about the duty of "getting up his subject," and so never 
losing in the judgment seat the reader's attitude toward 
books. His address to the Modern Language Association, 
once an encouragement, is now a rebuke to the college 
professor of comparative literature, a subject which 
has become all comparison and no hterature, if I 



204 THE SPmiT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

may judge by such living professors as I have listened to or 
read. 

"If I did not rejoice," says Lowell, "in the wonderful 
advance made in the comparative philology of the modern 
languages, I should not have the face to be standing here. 
But neither should I, if I shrank from saying what I believed 
to be the truth, whether here or elsewhere. I think that the 
purely linguistic side in the teaching of them seems in the 
way to get more than its fitting share. I insist only that in 
our college courses this should be a separate study, and 
that, good as it is in itself, it should, in the scheme of general 
instruction, be restrained to its own function as the guide 
to something better. And that something better is Litera- 
ture. Let us rescue ourselves from what Milton calls 'these 
grammatic flats and shallows.' The blossoms of language 
have certainly as much value as its roots; for if the roots 
secrete food and thereby transmit Ufe to the plant, yet the 
joyous consummation of that Ufe is in the blossoms, which 
alone bear the seeds that distribute and renew it in other 
growths. Exercise is good for the muscles of mind and to 
keep it well in hand for work, but the true end of Culture 
is to give it play, a thing quite as needful." 

As an amateur enjoying himself in a wide range of litera- 
ture, Lowell sometimes misjudges. Many commonplace 
instructors in English could point out where he was wrong, 
but they are wrong, too, and are not interesting. As Mr. 
Ambrose Bierce said of one of them, "Professor Matthews 
is nothing if not accurate, and he is not accurate." What 
difference does it make if Lowell is wrong in his contention 



LOWELL 205 

about Chaucer's nine-syllable line? The significant thing 
is that no other American professor, not even Child with all 
his knowledge, has written an essay on Chaucer which like 
Lowell's is itself hterature. 

Lowell illuminates even where he misjudges and therein 
he differs from critics who write with such modified judg- 
ments and well-tempered compensations that they elabo- 
rately kill their discourses. Lowell's essay on Thoreau is 
unjust. But even one who regards Thoreau as very great 
will find himself unable to improve upon Lowell's praises 
on the last atoning page. "There are sentences of his 
as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts as 
clearly crystallized; his metaphors and images are always 
fresh from the soil; he had watched Nature Hke a detective 
who is to go upon the stand; as we read him, it seems as if 
all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and become its own 
Montaigne; we look at the landscape as in a Claude Lor- 
raine glass; compared with his, all other books of similar 
aim, even White's 'Selborne,' seem dry as a country clergy- 
man's meteorological journal in an old almanac. He 
belongs with Donne and Browne and Novalis; if not with 
the originally creative men, with the scarcely smaller class 
who are peculiar, and whose leaves shed their invisible 
thought seeds like ferns." 

The opening pages of the same essay are an acid caricature 
of a whole era of thought and are good reading if not taken 
too seriously. They are written by a man who is more 
than a literary critic, who is a satirist of human nature, 
the same satirist who wrote the double-edged commentaries 



206 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

of Hosea's friend, the Rev. Homer Wilbur. Lowell's essay 
on Carlyle measures exactly the place in nineteenth-century 
thought that now, looking back, we can see Carlyle had come 
to at that time. If some readers of modern poetry have 
fallen out with Pope, Lowell's essay will incite them to read 
Pope again and learn his unique excellence. The paper 
"On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" is ultimate 
criticism of all books by all people, especially Englishmen, 
on countries where the writers do not live. 

Lowell has the true essayist's inability to stick to his 
subject. Apropos of a book or a writer he talks of anything 
that happens to be suggested to him. This quality makes 
him an excellent letter-writer and as his friends report him, 
a deUghtful talker, natural king in the easy-chair throne. 
Some formalistic critics, who seem to think that the whole 
universe of literature depends on their saying just the right 
thing, object too strongly to Lowell's habit of kicking up 
his heels in the midst of a fine passage. Lamb, the greatest 
of critics, does the same thing. It comes from irrepressible 
high spirits, delight in life, which is a good thing in hterature, 
and is correspondingly good in the criticism of hterature. 
No other writer about books after Lamb and Hazlitt is more 
continuously readable than Lowell. His very prejudices 
are entertaining; they lead him to some bold hard hitting 
which, we are told, passed out of good society with the days 
of Macaulay and Poe; perhaps that is the reason some of us 
read Macaulay and Poe in preference to critics of finer 
amenity. Lowell always talks like an honest man, never 
like a Uterary poseur. His affectations are not really aflFec- 



LOWELL 207 

tations, for he expects you to know what he is doing, to play- 
act with him in a momentary interruption before he goes 
on again with the lesson in hand. He tells what books 
mean to him, not what they ought to mean to him because 
some other critic has said so. He is capable of fine eloquence, 
and he has a habit of bringing his eloquence quickly down 
by whimsical change of mood. He has variety of style 
because he has variety of feelings. The irregularities of 
his prose are due not wholly to carelessness, but partly to 
exuberance and to the impulsive pursuit of his idea. 

All Lowell's prose is good to read. One volume of it is 
indispensable to an American, the "Political Essays." We 
can read somebody else's essays on Gray and Keats, but no 
one of the time has left us a better volume of its kind than 
Lowell's papers on political aflFairs. In 1888 when he col- 
lected them he wrote: 

"In looking at them again after so long an interval (for 
the latest of them is more than twenty years old) it gratifies 
me to find so httle to regret in their tone, and that I was 
able to keep my head fairly clear of passion when my heart 
was at boiling point." 

Like Mazzini and Phillips, Lowell preaches God and the 
People. Later he clung to God but drew away from the 
people. The foolish charge of Anglomania once brought 
against him was a poor return for his adequate services 
in Spain and England, which he gave as a matter of con- 
science when he would rather have been back in his hbrary. 
But that charge is merely a wrong way of putting what is 
true, that he had outhved his democracy. He saw, as he 



208 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

believed, that the country was falling away from the ideals 
of Lincoln, and when he caricatured Wendell Phillips he did 
not see that he was taking a place analogous to that of 
cultivated gentlemen of an earlier time who wanted slavery 
let alone. The hot heart and cool head that enabled him 
to see Lincoln in 1864 and served him in his fine dignified 
polemic on the Seward-Johnson reaction, ceased to work 
together. It was a different man who in 1886 wrote "The 
Progress of the World, " which is a demonstration that one 
man in the world had ceased to progress. He was no longer 
interested in the march toward any "New Jerusalem." 
Never again in his last quarter century was he so strong, so 
truly the Lowell of "The Biglow Papers," as when he wrote 
in 1868: 

"We have only to be unswervingly faithful to what is 
the true America of our hope and beHef, and whatever is 
American will rise from one end of the country to the other 
instinctively to our side, with more than ample means of 
present succour and of final triumph. It is only by being 
loyal and helpful to Truth that men learn at last how loyal 
and helpful she can be to them." 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge, Massachu- 
setts, February 22, 1819; he died there August 12, 1891. 
He graduated from Harvard in 1838. For a while he studied 
law. In 1844 he married Maria White; she died in 1853. 
He spent the years 1851-2, 1855 and 1856 in Europe. In 
1857 he succeeded Longfellow as Smith Professor of Litera- 



LOWELL 209 

ture in Harvard College, and held the chair for fifteen years. 
He married his second wife, Frances Diinlap, in 1857. He 
was the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly and in 1862 he 
became co-editor with Charles Eliot Norton of the North 
American Review. He was appointed minister to Spain 
in 18^7 and was transferred to England in 1880. He was 
relieved of pohtical duty in 1885 when Cleveland became 
president. 

His principal works are: Poems, 1844, 1848; Conversa- 
tions on Some of the Old Poets, 1845; The Biglow Papers, 
First Series, 1848; A Fable for Critics, 1848; Fireside Travels, 
1864; Commemoration Ode, 1865; The Biglow Papers, 
Second Series, 1866; Under the Willows, 1869; The Cathedral 
1869; Among My Books, 1870, 1876; My Study Windows, 
1871; Three Memorial Poems, 1876; Democracy and Other 
Addresses, 1886; Heartsease and Rue, 1888; Pohtical Essays, 
1888; Latest Literary Essays and Addresses, 1891; The Old 
English Dramatists, 1892; Letters (edited by C. E. Norton), 
1893. 

The Life of Lowell by Mr. Ferris Greenslet is authentic. 
"Recollections and Appreciations" by Francis H. Under- 
wood and "James Russell Lowell and His Friends" by Dr. 
E. E. Hale are deUghtful and personal. A good essay is 
that by Mr. Henry James in "Essays in London." 



CHAPTER Xir 
WHITMAN 

The singers are welcomed, understood, appear often enough, but 
rare has the day been, Ukewise the spot, of the birth of the maker 
of poems, the Answerer, 

Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distilled from poems pass 
away. 

The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes, 

Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil of 
literature, 

America justifies itself, give it time, no disguise can deceive it or 
conceal from it, it is impassive enough. 

Only the likes of itself will advance to meet it. 

If its poets appear it will in due time advance to meet them, there 
is no fear of mistake 

(The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferred till his country ab- 
sorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it). 

Only one day in the century of American literature is 
marked by the birth of a "maker of poems, an Answerer " — 
the day when Whitman was born. The history of Whitman, 
of his poetry and of the effect it has had on many kinds of 
men, is the history of the slow advance of democracy to meet 
its poets — or one of its poets, for there shall be many. When 
"Leaves of Grass" appeared in 1855, it was welcomed by a 
few great liberal spirits, notably by Emerson. Later Whitman 

210 



WHITMAN 211 

was hailed by some English men of letters, including several 
of the young pre-Raphaelite group, who were at once so 
daringly modern and so yearningly curious of the middle 
ages. Conventional "teachers" of hterature, professional 
book reviewers, whom Whitman openly challenged with his 
magnificent kindly scorn, quite naturally returned fire, and 
inevitably betrayed their impotence. A group of young 
Americans, then at the beginning of careers which have since 
made their names known, such as Mr. John Burroughs and 
Mr. Horace Traubel, formed a Whitman cult, whose devo- 
tion and nobility of thought more than atone for such 
partisan over-emphasis as is characteristic of all militant 
discipleships. A generation of British poets and radical 
thinkers, who were young when "Leaves of Grass" was 
new, for instance W. E. Henley and Edward Carpenter, have 
felt Whitman's influence and been strengthened by it in 
true self-expression. The present generation of young 
readers of poetry contains men who no more doubt that 
Whitman is the greatest poetic voice of nature and hberty 
since Wordsworth and Shelley than they doubt that Lincoln 
was the greatest statesman. 

Meanwhile the great public, common humanity, the "aver- 
age man" whom Whitman loved and knew better than 
did Wordsworth or Shelley or any other poet, seems to 
deny its own prophet. That is, the multitude do not 
read him, thereby negatively attesting that they hold 
him the equal of Dante and Milton, whom also they 
do not read. "I bestow upon any man or woman," 
says Whitman, "the entrance to all the gifts of the uui- 



212 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

verse." But many men and women do not accept his 
generosity. 

The indifference of democracy to its greatest poet seems a 
paradox, but the indifference does not exist. America is 
not a democracy; it is a vast bourgeoisie; the democracy 
which Whitman celebrates has not arrived on the earth. 
The men and women he saw and loved were the material 
of which he believed a democracy is some day to be born. 
So that when professors, deaf and blind to the hfe about 
them and especially to "democracy," which is as yet felt 
only by a minority, say that the ideals of the people are con- 
trary to Whitman's ideals of the people, they are super- 
ficially right. The ideals of the people are bourgeois ideals 
inculcated by most of the "savants" in obedience to the eco- 
nomic powers that endow and dominate the universities. 
The democratic ideal, the ideal of Shelley, of Mazzini, of 
young Wagner, of Lincoln (corroborative passages are abun- 
dant in the writings of these apparently dissimilar men) has 
not yet reached the majority of the people. The middle- 
class thinkers and teachers who manage our schools and our 
press are undemocratic and ignorant. It is true, as Professor 
George Santayana says, that "Whitman failed radically in 
his dearest ambition," if his dearest ambitioi^Vas to be read 
by the millions; but Whitman, who was no fool, did not 
expect in his lifetime to be read by a million people. More- 
over, to say, as Professor Santayana says, that "he can never 
be the poet of the people" is a prophecy, which, since one 
man has as much right as another to guess at the future, 
can be met with the contrary prophecy that Whitman will be 



WHITMAN 213 

one of the poets of the people when, and not until, democr^-cy 
dominates this world; then the people will "advance to 
meet him; there is no fear of mistake." To say that 
democracy did not accept him is like saying that Nature 
did not buy copies of Wordsworth's poems or that the 
inhabitants of the Infernal areas do not sit about reading 
Dante. Shelley and Morris, the greatest of all English 
poets of hberty, are not in the coat pockets of the workmen 
whose emancipation they chanted. The reviews of the 
year 1820 show that the gross-minded respectable persons 
of Shelley's time gave him the same reception which Literary 
and Academic Authority accorded to Whitman, and the 
dear pubhc still ignores Shelley after a hundred years. In 
the course of time it became the conventional thing to read 
and admire Shelley, or to admire him whether one read 
him or not. That is, his "Skylark" and other nature poems 
were found to be admirable, just as Whitman's "Captain, 
My Captain" and the song of the bird in "Sea Drift" find 
favour with lovers of pure lyrics and are included in chaste 
unrevolutionary anthologies of poetry. But Shelley's poetic 
rage against tyranny is so far In advance of British life to-day, 
that if his ideas were put into prose (so that English people 
could understand them), and if they were propagated by 
the universities and reviews that know all about art, the 
government would order the troops out as promptly as it 
does when workmen strike for the right to live. Similarly 
Whitman's essential ideas must be ignored or comfortably 
misunderstood by the licensed thought-mongers, and the 
people must be taught that when any idea like Whitman's 



214 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

appeals to them as right and just and truly democratic, they 
are "being cheated by demagogues," as Professor Santayana 
puts it. 

So much argument is necessary to account for the stupidity 
of learned doctors and acknowledged teachers of aesthetics 
in their treatment of Whitman. They are the voice of in- 
trenched respectability against every voice of democracy. 
Whether Whitman becomes the poet of the people de- 
pends solely on whether the people rise from their 
economic and spiritual slavery and organize a true 
democracy. Then only will disappear the possibiUty that 
a professor of reputed authority in matters of art and 
philosophy can find an analogy "between a mass of 
images without structure and the notion of an absolute de- 
mocracy." 

Wliitman's poetry is no more without structure than 
Shakespeare's; and "an absolute democracy" would be the 
most highly organized and well constructed government 
possible. The disorder which Whitman pictures is the 
world as It is; his democracy is an ideal, a society of the 
future which is to grow out of the visible disorder of the 
present. 

Whoever, then, does not understand what the word 
"democracy" means, whoever does not understand that 
we are not living in a democracy at all but in a timo- 
cracy, that is, under a capitalistic oligarchy, cannot 
understand Whitman — or any other radical thinker of the 
nineteenth century, Ruskin, Thoreau, Wagner, Tolstoy. 
Whitman, who understood men and affairs shrewdly. 



WHITMAN 215 

is not under any delusion that the life about him is 
democratic. He chants it as a confusion, and celebrates 
it for what it may become. The true America is for 
him still asleep. 

Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing? 
What deepening twilight-scum floating atop of the waters? — 
Who are they as bats and night dogs askant at the capitol? 
What a filthy presidentiad ! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, 

your arctic freezings!) 
Are those really congressmen? are those the great judges? is that the 

President? 
Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep, for 

reasons; 
(With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots 

we shall all duly awake. 
South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we wiU surely 

awake). 

The country is not yet awake, but all the countries of the 
world are turning in their sleep. I pick up this morning's 
copy of a labour paper, and read signs not yet understood 
by pohticians or by professors of philosophy and economics. 
In that paper amid the news of the day, I find quotations 
from Whitman and Ruskin — small signs indicating, perhaps, 
only an editor who reads good books. When we wish to 
know what "the people" read, it is diflBcult to get a census, 
but if we are wise we do not try to find out by consulting 
the New York Nation. 

In his "Song of the Broad Axe," Whitman chants the 
construction of Democracy, not the America of Mr. Bryce's 



216 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

"Commonwealth," nor the America of the Western continent, 
but the coming world of free men. 

Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and 

bards, 
Where the city stands that is belov'd by these, and loves them in 

return and understands them, 
Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and 

deeds. 
Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place, 
Where the men and women think hghtly of the laws. 
Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases. 
Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity 

of elected persons. 
Where fierce men and women pour forth as the sea to the whistle 

of death pours its sweeping and unript waves. 
Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of in- 
side authority. 
Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and President, 

Mayor, Governor and what not, are agents for pay. 
Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend 

on themselves, 
Where equanimity is illustrated in affairs. 
Where speculations on the soul are encouraged. 
Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same 

as the men. 
Where they enter the pubHc assembly and take places the same as 

the men; 
Where the city of the faithfulest friends stands. 
Where the city of the cleanliness of the sexes stands. 
Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands. 
Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands. 
There the great city stands. 



WHITMAN 217 

This is not the city of any present land but the city of 
to-morrow. 

Thou Mother with thy equal brood, 

Thou varied chain of different States, yet one identity only, 

A special song before I go I'd sing o'er all the rest, 

For thee, the future. 

The whole of this splendid poem to a union as yet unful- 
filled should take its place in collections of patriotic pieces, 
amid the national boasts in doggerel and the hymns that 
sing the warlike glories of the past. The songs of a nation 
probably have less influence on it than poets like to believe. 
Yet it would seem that a stronger nutriment than "My 
Country 'Tis of Thee" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" 
must be provided for American children, if they are ever to 
breed a better race than we are, the race that Whitman 
proclaims. 

The soul, its destinies, the real real, 

(Purport of all these apparitions of the real) 

In thee, America, the soul, its destinies. 

Thou globe of globes, thou wonder nebulous! 

By many a throe of heat and cold convulsed (by these thyself 

solidifying). 
Thou mental orb — thou New, indeed New, Spiritual World ! 
The present holds thee not — for such vast growth as thine, 
For such unparallel'd flight as thine, such brood as thine. 
The Future only holds thee and can hold thee. 

Whatever the future holds must be made of all the ele- 
ments of the present. Therefore Whitman sings the universal 



218 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

world-ground, actuality. "Leaves of Grass" is a progres- 
sion, a development, natural, seemingly spontaneous, 
following and recording Whitman's personal growth, yet 
deliberately, consciously wrought to symbolize the growth 
of the world. "The Song of Myself" is a vast analogy rep- 
resenting the universe. To the superficial reader a purpose- 
less string of details, it is really a song of the materials of 
which the poem of life is to be made. Out of it spring the 
songs of love, of national unity (that is, the common brother- 
hood of man), of cities, of nature, of war and its hero (Lin- 
coln, the wise civilian), of religion, of death. Those who have 
not read Whitman or have been misled by those who have 
not read him, should open "Leaves of Grass" in the middle, 
and come under the spell of the self-explanatory beautiful 
things, "Sea Drift," "The Song of Joys," "When Lilacs 
Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," and then, having got a 
liking for him, should read him through to understand 
him entire. The " Song of Myself " and " Children of Adam " 
are to be understood only as part of his whole development, 
and it may be that since they stand first in "Leaves of Grass," 
they have forbidden some readers to go deeper into the 
book. 

At the beginning of his work he is belligerently advancing 
a new theory of poetry. The prose explanation of this 
theory is his "Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," 
which is as great a moment in the progress of criticism 
as "The Arte of English Poesie" and Wordsworth's 
prefaces to the "Lyrical Ballads." He holds that noth- 
ing, if deeply understood, is too ignoble for poetic ex- 



WHITMAN 219 

pression, and that the true poet will not omit the facts of 
Ufe. 

I dare not shirk any part of myself, 
Not any part of America good or bad. 

To enforce his doctrine that "a leaf of grass is no less 
than the journey-work of the stars," he at first deliberately, 
even aggressively, selects commonplace things, repulsive 
things, "the corpse with its dabbled hair," the "sluff of boot 
soles," "what is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest," 
Under stress of his conviction he seems to go out of his way 
to mingle together the grotesque and the magnificent, the 
petty and the supernal. Later, when he takes himself 
more for granted and has less need to drive home his theory 
of poetic diction and poetic content, he is not so much 
inclined to what may seem a pell-mell catalogue; like other 
great poets he comes to full mastery of himseK and his ideas. 
Therefore his later poems are more likely than his earlier 
ones to capture the new reader. At least let it be understood 
that he is not, even when he sings of "Me, Walt Whitman, 
Manhattanese," blowing his own horn, but is personating 
man and the universe. "I am the man, I suffered and 
was there." "I am the hounded slave." " I am the mashed 
fireman with breast-bone broken." "I am the old artil- 
lerist." "Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go 
up too, and am tried and sentenced." "I tramp a perpetual 
journey." 

Rightly comprehended, Whitman's central theme is a cos- 
mic declaration of sympathy, a reverberant announcement 



220 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

of the love and imagination which enable the great artist 
to identify himself with all the joys and sorrows of man. 
The idea has never been more mightily, more embracingly 
expressed, and its seemingly haphazard details are intended, 
calculated by a poet in confident command of his thought 
and his symbols, to suggest inclusion, a human-godlike 
numbering of the falling sparrow and measurement of the 
wide circuit of the star. Whitman breaks through all arti- 
ficial boundaries erected by the blind hostilities of men, 
all castes, philosophies and schools that keep neighbours 
upon a common globe sundered from each other and from 
their common work. He strikes the mind from a hundred 
sides, to reach it somehow, if not with one detail then with 
another, to shock us out of our false conceits, deliver us from 
the prison of unsympathetic isolation. It is not he who is 
fragmentary and disparate, but our thoughts and interests. 
Great-hearted people love him and understand him. He is 
unintelligible or offensive to persons who have been deflected 
from him by some single verses and so have never entered 
him, and to persons whose education has cramped their 
humanity or who had little humanity to begin with. The 
new reader will find that he must read "Leaves of Grass'' 
several times to get the full import of it. The central idea 
is expressed in its most compact form in "By Blue Ontario's 
Shores" and "A Song for Occupations." But "Leaves of 
Grass" is one poem, as truly as is Goethe's "Faust" or 
Dante's "Divina Commedia." It must be read entire, or 
it will not be understood even by those who eagerly accept 
and appreciate some of the parts. 



WHITMAN 221 

Like an earlier lover of men, Whitman holds his arms about 
the poor and the diseased; like Wordsworth and Burns he 
finds beauty in the trench-digger and the breaker of stones. 
But no one before him ever gathered the world to his bosom 
with such immense tenderness. At thirty-five he phrased 
impulsively, as no one else has ever phrased it, that portrait 
of man-loving man which a few years later as hospital 
nurse he illustrated in his own conduct. 

In no other volume of poetry, in neither Dante nor Shake- 
speare, are so many motives of life so powerfully suggested, 
blent, interfused as in "Leaves of Grass." Each motive, 
each person, each leaf is on a stipe which stands rooted in 
the universal ground. The songs of sexual love are pseans 
to nature. A woman's breast heaves like the sea, and father- 
hood emblemizes the continuous procreation of the world 
which wills ever to be, never to cease. In the elegy on 
Lincoln, "lilac and star and bird" are twined in a song to 
Death. The friendships of men coil about the world and 
bind the races in a mystic, still unrealized, yet living human 
brotherhood. Comradeship flowers from the shambles of 
War. "Beautiful Death" becomes a mode of fife. The 
"primal sanities" of nature are not shaken by bloody 
conflict. The sacred moon bathes the battlefield with im- 
partial light as we all see it in physical nature and as Whit- 
man makes us feel it in the meaning of nature. Love, the 
reconciler, enfolds all: 

Word over all, beautiful as the sky, 

Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be 
utterly lost. 



222 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly 

wash again and ever again, this soU'd world; 
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, 
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin — I draw 

near. 
Bend down and touch lightly with my hps the white face in the 

coflSn. 

Whitman, v^^ho viewed the world whole, who fitted each 
least word knowingly in its place, who celebrated the integ- 
rity of things, must be read whole. "Leaves of Grass" — let 
it be repeated with Whitmanian insistence — is a unit, an 
ensemble, to use a favourite word of his; it is not a fortuitous 
collection of passing moods and detached visions, but a 
total confession of a man's poetic faith, the end seen from the 
beginning, all perfectly articulate and wrought patiently 
by a master who knew as absolutely as Alexander Pope or 
any other rhetorically cunning poet just what his effect 
should be and how to arrive at it. 

Single passages selected from Whitman may be misunder- 
stood and have been misunderstood even by readers inclined 
to be appreciative. To take a comic example, the words 
"barbaric yawp" have been quoted by themselves as if 
they were Whitman's estimate of his poetry! He had no 
such poor opinion of himself; he thought his verse beautiful, 
he intended to make it beautiful, he was a passionate lover 
of exquisite sounds and sights. The passage which contains 
the words "barbaric yawp" is intelligible as a whole; it 
begins with a hawk swooping and crying over the roofs of 
the town; Whitman instantly identifies himself with the 



WHITMAN 223 

hawk and flies and cries with it, as in another place he sonor- 
ously, murmurously identifies himself with the surges of the 
sea, his father, his "fierce old mother." 

A more serious illustration of the ruinous effect of selecting 
single poems and phrases out of Whitman, with no sense 
of his vocabulary as the rest of his poetry establishes and 
clarifies it, is the abusive quotation of parts of " The Children 
of Adam." Whitman, who sets out to praise the entire 
world, praises along with the rest what every honest man 
acknowledges, values, delights in, suffers from, the procrea- 
tive impulse, the force which in our traditional literature 
few books except the Bible treat plainly, the force that 
romantic literature has perverted and comic literature has 
poisoned with its cynicism. Whitman makes us ashamed 
of our shame. "Sweet, sane still Nakedness in Nature," 
he says in "Specimen Days" — "Ah, if poor, sick, prurient 
humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is 
not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is 
your thought, your fear, your respectability that is indecent." 
The world has soiled us so indelibly that we shall need a 
century of regeneration and many powerful voices besides 
Whitman's to cure us of our hypocrisy and pusillanimity. 
The civilized man to-day knows that his words on this sub- 
ject will be futile and suspect, and so he quotes gratefully 
from one of his superiors, Anne Gilchrist, a noble English 
woman, whose delicate purity responded to the superb purity 
of Whitman. In a letter to William M. Rossetti, the first 
English editor of Whitman, she writes : 

"You argued rightly that my confidence would not be 



224 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

betrayed by any of the poems in this book. None of them 
troubled me even for a moment; because I saw at a glance 
that it was not, as men had supposed, the heights brought 
down to the depths, but the depths lifted up level with the 
sunHt heights, that they might become clear and sunlit too. 
Always, for a woman, a veil woven out of her own soul — 
never touched upon even, with a rough hand, by this poet. 
But, for a man, a daring, fearless pride in himself, not a 
mock-modesty woven out of delusions — a very poor imita- 
tion of a woman's. Do they not see that this fearless 
pride, this complete acceptance of themselves, is needful 
for her pride, her justification.'* What! is it all so ignoble, 
so base, that it will not bear the honest light of speech from 
lips so gifted with 'the divine power to use words'? Then 
what hateful, bitter humiliation for her, to have to give 
herself up to the reality ! Do you think there is ever a bride 
who does not taste more or less this bitterness in her cup? 
But who put it there? It must surely be man's fault, not 
God's that she has to say to herself, 'Soul, look another 
way — you have no part in this. Motherhood is beautiful, 
fatherhood is beautiful; but the dawn of fatherhood and 
motherhood is not beautiful.' Do they really think that 
God is ashamed of what He has made and appointed? And, 
if not, surely it is somewhat superfluous that they should 
undertake to be so for Him. 

" ' The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul,' 

"Of a woman above all. It is true that instinct of silence 
I spoke of is a beautiful, imperishable part of nature too. 



WHITMAN 225 

But it is not beautiful when it means an ignominious shame 
brooding darkly. Shame is like a very flexible veil, that 
follows faithfully the shape of what it covers — beautiful 
when it hides a beautiful thing, ugly when it hides an ugly 
one. It has not covered what was beautiful here; it has cov- 
ered a mean distrust of a man's self and of his Creator. 
It was needed that this silence, this evil spell, should for 
once be broken, and the daylight let in, that the dark cloud 
lying under might be scattered to the winds. It was 
needed that one who could here indicate for us 'the path 
between reality and the soul' should speak. That is what 
these beautiful, despised poems, 'The Children of Adam,' 
do, read by the light that glows out of the rest of the volume: 
light of a clear, strong faith in God, of an unfathomably 
deep and tender love for humanity — light shed out of a 
soul that is 'possessed of itself.'" 

The Platonic idea of love, as well expressed in some of 
Shakespeare's sonnets as anywhere in English literature, 
merges the love of individuals in the love of immortal beauty. 
It is a noble idea and seems at first sight not unlike Whit- 
man's sinking of the personal in the universal. But the Pla- 
tonic idea is a thin abstraction which denatures love, robs it 
of its human countenance in the process of eternalizing it. 
More vitally noble is Whitman's ideal which finds the body 
and soul of love in the bosom of living nature and glorifies 
the will to live, the irresistible urge of creation, one of 
the many voices by which the universe aflSrms that 
it shall not die. The individual love, its meeting 
and parting, is a token of the world, which is not "chaos 



226 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

or death," but "form, union, plan," it is eternal life — it is 
happiness. 

Out of the rolling ocean, the crowd, came a drop gently to me. 

Whispering I love you, before long I die, 

I have traveVd a long way vierely to look on you to touch you. 

For I could not die till I once look'd on you. 

For I feared I might afterward lose you. 

Now we have met, we have look'd, we are safe. 

Return in peace to the ocean, my love. 

I too am part of that ocean, my love, we are not so much separated, 

Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect! 

But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us, 

As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse 

forever; 
Be not impatient — a little space — know you I salute the air, the 

ocean and the land. 
Every day at sundown for your dear sake, my love. 

Whitman is the poet of joy, of grave, deep, well-meditated 
joy, which breaks forth into moments of delirious ecstasy. 
There is a kind of joy often expressed by romantic poets 
which Is followed by a sickly reaction; in the poetry of the 
nineteenth century it is seen sitting amid the ruins of a 
spurious medisevalism, wofully rubbing the morning head 
of disillusion. If, as in Browning, it marches victorious to 
the last, it pays for its continuance by falsifying life. Pippa's 
jubilant and morally efficacious song is so factitiously timed 
that disbelief refuses to remain suspended in a mind that 
sees life courageously from all sides. The curative, obvi- 
ously cheering fact does not on most days of the world arrive 
on schedule like the doctor to a patient. Whitman is not 



WHITMAN 227 

so blind that he must justify life by denying the odious 
parts of it; he is no timid, dishonest optimist, but brave- 
ly, even brutally, commands you to see all aspects of the 
conflict. 

Strange and hard the paradox true I give. 
Objects gross and the soul unseen are one. 

He warbles "unmitigated adoration" only after he has 
accepted life whole, "sized it up" and decided that the uni- 
verse is not "a suck and a sell." Representing himself as 
a loafer, sipping delights here and there, he is no butterfly 
of the hour, but of all poets he is the one who faces death 
with eyes widest open, serenely comprehending it, and 
protesting plainly against the optimism that is founded on 
blind denial of facts. 

"the rounded catalogue divine complete** 

[Sunday, . Went this afternoon to church. A college pro- 

fessor. Rev. Dr. gave tis a fine sermon, during which I caught the 

above words; hut the minister included in his 'rounded catalogue ' letter 
and spirit, only the esthetic things, and entirely ignored what I have 
named in the following.] 

The devilish and the dark, the dying and diseas'd, 

The countless (nineteen-twentieths) low and evil, crude and savage. 

The crazed, prisoners in jail, the horrible, rank, malignant. 

Venom and filth, serpents, the ravenous sharks, liars, the dissolute; 

(What is the part the wacked and the loathesome bear within earth's 

orbic scheme.'') 
Newts, crawling things in slime and mud, poisons, 
The barren soU, the evil men, the slag and hideous rot. 



228 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

In another poem: 

I observe the sHghts and degradations cast by arrogant persons 
upon labourers, the poor, and upon negroes and the hke; 

All these — all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look 
out upon. 

See, hear, and am silent. 

So facing life he yet names it joy, because joy is the force 
of life and the lack of it is real death, spiritual death. 

Not to exclude or demarcate, or pick out evils from their formidable 

masses (even to expose them) 
But add, fuse, complete, extend — and celebrate the immortal and 

the good. 

Joy, shipmate, joy! 
(Pleas'd to my soul at death I cry). 
Our life is closed, our life begins. 
The long, long anchorage we leave. 
The ship is clear at last, she leaps! 
She swiftly courses from the shore, 
Joy, shipmate, joy! 

This for him at seventy is 

THE CALMING THOUGHT OF ALL 

That coursing on, whate'er men's speculations. 
Amid the changing schools, theologies, philosophies. 
Amid the bawling presentations new and old. 
The round earth's silent, vital laws, facts, modes continue. 

In the year that "trembled and reeled beneath him": 

Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself. 
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled? 



^\TIIT]VIAN 229 

And the sullen hymns of defeat? 

And yet not you alone, twilight and hurrying ebb. 

Nor you, ye lost designs alone — nor failures, aspirations; 

I know, divine deceitful ones, your glamour's seeming; 

Duly by you, from you, the tide and Ught again — duly the hinges 

turning. 
Duly the needed discord-parts offsetting, blending. 
Weaving from you, from Sleep, Night, Death itself. 
The rhythmus of Birth Eternal, 

This is his reflection on Hegel: 

Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good 

steadily hastening towards immortality. 
And the vast all that is call'd Evil I saw hastening to merge itself 

and become lost and dead. 

Many a riotously delighted lover of life, many a thought- 
less hedonist in the flush of youth, runs headlong against 
the fact of Death and is daunted, and from him we get the 
weary song of sorrow and parting and loneliness and the end. 
But Whitman in the heyday of his prime sees Death and 
embraces Him. 

Death is beautiful . . . (what indeed is finally beautiful except 

death and love?) 
I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers, I 

think it must be for death, 
For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the atmosphere of 

lovers. 
Death or life, I am then indifferent, my soul declines to prefer, 
( I am not sure but the liigh soul of lovers welcomes death most) 



230 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Give me your tone therefore O death, that I may accord with it. 
Give me yourself, for I see that you belong to me now above all, 

and are folded inseparably together, you love and death are, 
Nor will I allow you to balk me any more with what I was calling 

life. 
For now it is conveyed to me that you are the purports essential. 
That you hide in these shifting forms of hfe, for reasons, and that 

they are mainly for you. 

In a great tragedy, Greek or Shakespearian, death is the 
solace and necessary end for sinful and unhappy lives, and 
the close leaves the soul of the spectator in peace, because 
bad, unhappy people are better dead. But life has a greater 
tragedy than that, the death of the young and the beautiful 
and the innocent; it is not a fitful fever upon which the 
blessed curtain falls, but the end is inexplicable and unfitting, 
and for that classic and romantic tragedy has no peaceful 
word to say. But Whitman sees in death one of the conso- 
lations of life, not because it stops the tragedy of evil, tortured 
lives, but because Impartial Death does not consider whether 
the life has been evil or good, happy or wretched; it is part 
of the joy of a tragedy that is never done and which needs 
no last act to give it reason, for the last act is the first and the 
first the last, and both are everlasting. 

Come lovely and soothing death. 

Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving. 

In the day, in the night, to all, to each. 

Sooner or later, delicate death. 

Prais'd be the fathomless universe. 

For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious. 

And for love, sweet love — but praise! praise! praise! 



WHITIVIAN 231 

For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death. 

Dark mother always gUding near with soft feet. 

Have none chanted for thee a chant of the fullest welcome? 

Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all, 

I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come un- 
falteringly. 

Approach strong deliveress, 

When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead, 

Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee. 

Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death. 

From me to thee glad serenades, 

Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and f eastings 
for thee. 

And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are 
fitting. 

And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night. 

The night in silence under many a star. 

The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know, 

And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil'd death. 

And the body gratefuUy nestling close to thee. 

Over the tree-tops I float thee a song. 

Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the 
prairies wide. 

Over the dense-pack'd cities all and the teeming wharves and ways, 

I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death. 

It is the purpose of philosophy and religion to be the ulti- 
mate reconcilers of all the facts of man's life and death. 
The theologies with their promise of individual beatitude, 
now perceptibly fading in the beliefs of men, do not so 
effectually rob death of its sting as does Whitman, the 
devout pagan. He is the bravest of all poets of death. 
The philosophies, now wavering between a half-hearted 



232 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

rationalism and an idealism which is not philosophic at all 
but is an admixture in philosophy of unreasoned faiths, 
have not advanced one single argument so satisfying as Whit- 
man's confident harmonies. The philosopher, erecting a 
reasonable view of life, is distinguished for his ability to 
leave life altogether out of his scheme, or to sew life up in 
a system as if it were a mummy, whereupon life takes a long 
breath and splits the seams. 

Whitman's amplitude is elastic, it bears any strain of fact, 
yet it is positive, renerving, and does not, like the vast incon- 
clusion of most philosophy, leave you exactly where you 
began. Whitman's religion fuses the rigidity of creeds, and 
is too great for creed-bound men. 

O we can wait no longer. 

We too take ship O soul. 

Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas. 

Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail. 

Amid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, 

I thee to me, O soul). 
Caroling free, singing our song of God, 
Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration. 

With laugh and many a kiss, 

( Let others deprecate, let others weep for sin, remorse, 

hiuniliation), 
O soul thou pleasest me, I thee. 

Ah, more than any priest O sotJ we too beheve in God, 
But with the mystery of God we dare not dally. 

Lover divine and perfect Comrade, 
Waiting content, invisible yet, but certain. 



WHITMAN 233 

Be thou mj' God. 

Thou, thou, the Ideal Man, 

Fair, able, beautiful, content, and loving. 

Complete in body and dilate in spirit. 

Be thou my God. 

O Death, (for Life has served its turn) 

Opener and usher to the heavenly mansion. 

Be thou my God. 

Aught, aught of mightiest, best I see, conceive or know, 

(To break the stagnant tie — thee, thee to free, O soul). 

Be thou my God. 

All great ideas, the races' aspirations, 

AU heroisms, deeds of rapt enthusiasts. 

Be ye my Gods. 

Or Time and Space, 

Or shape of Earth divine and wondrous. 

Or some fair shape I viewing, worship. 

Or lustrous orb of sun or star by night. 

Be ye my Gods. 

This is a religion which Jews might kiss and infidels adore. 
Whitman's own use of the word "infidel" means one who is 
unfaithful to life. He reshapes traditional ethics, and ignores 
all the vicious virtues, such as tact, decorum, good taste, 
humility, remorse, and other dishonesties and degradations 
of the soul. Life is great and will not be judged by httle 
standards. Poetry is the expression of life, grows with it 
and builds its own laws as it grows. 

Whitman himself made much of the fact that he departed 
from the tradition of regular metres, and (as genius is fre- 
quently mistaken about itself) he thought that his departure 
was essential to his originality, whereas it was only one 



234 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

expression of his originality, and not the capital expression. 
His true originality lies in the use he made of the metres he 
chose and not at all in the fact or the degree of their tech- 
nical difference from other poetry. He created a new kind 
of poetry in so far forth as he created new poetry, and his 
creation is so powerful that whatever measure his words 
conform to at their best has become thereby established as 
a mode of poetry. yA. classic is one who makes new forms, 
or within old forms does things before undone. yThat the 
Elizabethan translation of the Hebrew poetry of the Bible 
takes a shape which is at once poetic and prosaic, the 
translators seeking only a conscientious true prose version, 
but various devices of Hebrew poetry, such as antithesis and 
refrain, inevitably showing through — this does not explain 
Whitman's form or even suggest its source. Equally beside 
the point is the well-known fact that all great emotional 
prose gathers itself together tensely, drops much of the gram- 
matical superfluity of prose, rises to a kind of lyrical passion, 
and its prosaic "other harmony" is felt like a subcurrent 
of movement under the higher truly poetic pukations. 
Whitman is the first great poet, who from feeling, or, as he 
would have it, from conviction and on principle, wrote 
unrhymed and unequal measures. When he began to make 
poetry he was a desultory reader, and it is safe to say that 
he never heard of some of the "sources" that critics like to 
dig out in order to account for him. 

The difference between vers libre and more regular metrical 
schemes bears some analogy to the difference between music 
in which free melodic themes are developed to express 



WHITMAN 235 

changing and progressive moods, and music on set patterns 
in which one stave springs from the preceding, is governed 
and limited by it. But analogies between the different arts 
should not be pressed too far. Poetry carries but a single 
thread of discourse; the words proceed in single file; whereas 
music may be, and in its great forms is, a fabric of themes; 
fifty voices in the orchestra may be speaking at once. There 
Is, however, a sound human analogy between the ways In 
which Whitman and Wagner were received by some readers 
and listeners. Said some: "Whitman is not true to any 
known metre of preceding poets; therefore he is no poet." 
Similarly argued their music-loving brethren In about the 
same glorious year of the world: "Wagner does not obey 
the laws of music as the masters have practised them and 
the teachers have codified them; therefore he is no musi- 
cian." 

The man whose education has partly paralyzed his Intelli- 
gence and spoiled his eyes and ears must hold a text-book 
up between himself and every work of art, and so he Is always 
puzzled by the arrival of a new genius. And since he is 
not necessarily an Ignoramus, but may be deeply familiar 
with the art of preceding times, he can make out an appar- 
ently good case against the innovator. The defender of a 
new master may cry out In the heat of partisanship : " Dolt ! 
Dunce! If you do not understand Wagner's beauty, you 
never truly imderstood Bach or the simplest traditional 
melody. If you do not know at once that Whitman is a 
great poet, you never truly heard, read, enjoyed Milton and 
Shakespeare!" Yet, In point of fact, some of Wagner's 



236 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

opponents were genuine musicians, and some of those whom 
Whitman offended were true poets, for example, Lanier. 
Musicians and poets and painters are sometimes most 
narrowly inhospitable to their brothers. The delight they 
feel, a lifelong joy, in certain works of art, is violated by 
innovations. They are offended as if, intensely loving one 
woman, they were asked to love another woman. Caring 
deeply for art, they suffer more acutely than the casual 
taster of art can appreciate. Byron did not like Keats; Fitz- 
gerald was blind to Mrs. Browning; Emerson was deaf to 
Poe; Whittier threw Whitman in the fire; Lowell, Longfellow, 
and Holmes agreed that "Whitman was of no account." 
Swinburne first devoured Whitman and then disgorged him 
with an obscenity of expression more disgusting than any- 
thing of which Walt Whitman's shirt-sleeve style is capable. 
So the poets, who, as Poe said, are certainly the best critics 
of poetry, sometimes bring the weight of their authority 
against each other. 

The ordinary reader can never have the aching joy and the 
painful aversions which are the poets' special privileges, 
but because he is ordinary he can gain in latitude what he 
lacks in depth. He can carry Poe in one coat pocket and 
Whitman in the other. He can share his affections between 
Keats and Byron; yes, he can let "Aurora Leigh" and "The 
Rubaiyat" stand together on his shelf of favourites. Since 
a man has not time to read much criticism, he should read 
the prose of the poets when they are celebrating each 
other, not when they are pushing each other off Parnassus. 
The warfare over Wagner, Ibsen, Whitman, need not dis- 



WHITMAN 237 

tress us. "Tannhauser," "Hedda Gabler," and "Leaves of 
Grass" have survived the rough reception they encountered 
in some quarters, and are healed of the blows that some 
very strong brother-giants of their authors administered to 
them. All we have to do is to listen to Whitman with the 
naked ear, the better if it has been refined by other poetry. 
In "Sea Drift" the bird which has lost its mate sings, and 
Whitman translates the notes, "following you, my brother." 

Soothe! soothe! soothe! 

Close on its wave soothes the wave behind. 

And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close. 

But my love soothes me not, not me. 

Low hangs the moon, it rose late. 

It is lagging — 01 think it is heavy with love, with love. 

O madly the sea pushes upon the land. 

With love, with love. 

night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers? 

What is that little black thing I see there in the white? 

Loud! loud! loud! 

Loud I call to you, my love! 

High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves. 

Surely you must know who is here, is here, 

You must know who I am, my love. 

Low-hanging moon! 

What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow? 

O it is the shape, the shape of my mate! 

moon do not keep me from her any longer. 

Land! land! O land! 

Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate back 

again if you only would. 
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look. 
O rising stars! 



238 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you. 

O throat! O trembling throat! 

Sound clearer through the atmosphere! 

Pierce the woods, the earth, 

Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one; I want. 

Shake out carols! 

Solitary here, the night's carols! 

Carols of lonesome love! death's carols! 

Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon! 

O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea! 

O reckless, despairing carols. 

But soft! sink low! 

Soft! let me just murmur. 

And do you wait a moment you husky-nois'd sea. 

For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me, 

So faint, I must be still, be still to listen. 

But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately 

to me. 
Hither my love! 
Here I am! here! 

With this just-sustain'd note I announce myself to you, 
This gentle call is for you, my love, for you. 
Do not be decoy'd elsewhere. 

That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice, 
That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray. 
Those are the shadows of leaves. 
O darkness ! O in vain ! 
O I am very sick and sorrowful. 

O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea! 
O troubled reflection in the sea! 
O throat! O throbbing heart! 
And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night. 
O past! O happy life! O songs of joy! 
In the air, in the woods, over fields, 



WHITIVIAN 239 

Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved! 
But my mate no more, no more with me! 
We two together no more. 

If the ineffable loveliness of that is not evident at once, 
no critical argument will avail, for poetry wins its way 
directly or not at all. However, one who has studied the 
technique of poetry may be permitted to point out that 
Whitman's "aria" is as absolutely metrical in its way, as 
Shelley's "Skylark" and Keats's "Nightingale" are in 
theirs; that it lacks no essential of great lyric poetry which 
the ear can hear or the mind can designate. If any reader 
is dead to its unsurpassable beauty, no excuse is pos- 
sible or necessary. But there is need of excuse or rebuke 
for those who are supposed to know something about 
poetry and who yet say, as more than one critic has 
said, that Whitman wrote prose because he could 
not write poetry, and that he is at his best in "Captain, 
My Captain " where he achieves "real poetic form." As 
if a master of words like Whitman could have any trouble 
writing rhymes and perfect iambics if he chose to write 
them ! Wagner, forsooth, cannot resolve a chord or write a 
Lutheran hymn! 

That Whitman can manage traditional forms, when it 
pleases him to try, is shown not only in "Captain, My Cap- 
tain" but in a less known and very touching poem, "Ethiopia 
Saluting the Colours": 

Who are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human. 

With your woolly-white and turban'd head, and bare, bony feet? 



240 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colours greet? 
('Tis while our army lines Carolina's sands and pines, 
Forth from thy hovel door thou Ethiopia com'st to me, 
As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.) 

Me master years a hundred since from my parents sundered 
A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught. 
Then hither me across the sea the cru^l slaver brought. 

No further does she say, but lingering all the day, 

Her high-borne turban'd head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye. 

And courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving by. 

What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human? 

Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green? 

Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen? 

Moreover, "Captain, My Captain," wonderful as it is, 
is less magnificent verse than "When Lilacs Last in the 
Dooryard Bloomed," with its progression and cross- weaving 
of themes; and "Ethiopia Saluting the Colours," perfect 
itself, is inferior to the majestic symbolism of "The Song 
of the Banner at Daybreak." 

When Whitman fails (and like other great poets he some- 
times fails to be his best), his failure is due not to his form, 
but to his failure to make poetry in it, precisely as Words- 
worth and Shakespeare fail in line after line of strictly 
methodical blank verse. 

Whitman's rhythms flow with his thought and emotion; 
they are part of his thought; the intermerging of sound 
and idea is the miracle that happens in all true poetry. 
It is a fatuous mistake to say that he writes imperfect 
hexameters. Many of his lines are dactylic in rhythm. 



WHITMAN 241 

Other lines are iambic. Those two measures reside in the 
accents of EngHsh words. The following line is a specimen 
of his dactylic movement: 

When million-footed Manhattan unpent descends to her pavements. 

But this movement seldom continues for more than two or 
three lines at a time. This is a specimen of iambic pursued 
for several lines- 

In other scenes than these have I observ'd thee flag. 
Not quite so trim and whole and freshly blooming in folds of stain- 
less silk, 
But I have seen thee bunting, to tatters torn upon thy splLnter'd 

staff, 
Or clutch 'd to some young colour-bearer's breast with desperate 

hands, 
Savagely struggled for, for life or death, fought over long 
'Mid cannons' thunder-crash and many a curse and groan and 

yell, and rifle-voUeys cracking sharp, 
And moving masses as wild demons surging, and hves as nothing 

risk'd. 
For thy mere remnant grimed with dirt and smoke and sopp'd in 

blood. 
For sake of that, my beauty, and that thou might'st dally as now 

secure up there. 
Many a good man have I seen go under. 

Whitman's thought often runs to antithesis and contrast, 
and his lines conform to the meaning in a rising and falling 
movement, a slow-pulsing systole and diastole, like 
the resurgent and receding seas. There is a fitness, 
accidental or calculated, most likely inseparable from 



242 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

the sound of the right words for the sense — a special 
fitness of \^Tiitman's measures to the sea. The voice of the 
breakers is in his chants, the uprushing waves and their 
foaming subsidence, as though Whitman were an elemental 
power resonantly answering to his equal in nature. 

You sea ! I resign myself to you also — I guess what you mean, 

I behold from the beach your crooked ir;viting fingers, 

I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me, 

We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of 

the land, 
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, 
Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you. 
Sea of stretch'd ground -swells. 
Sea breathing loud and convulsive breaths. 

Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell'd but always ready graves. 
Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea, 
I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all chases. 

Here and in the whole of "Sea Drift" has been fulfilled 
his aspiration: 

Had I the choice to tally greatest bards. 

To limn their portraits, stately beautiful, and emulate at will. 

Homer with all his wars and warriors — Hector, Achilles, Ajax, 

Or Shakspere's woe-entangled Hamlet, Lear, Othello — 

Tennyson's fair ladies. 

Metre or wit the best, or choice conceit to wield in perfect rhyme^ 

delight of singers; 
These, these, O sea, all these I'd gladly barter. 
Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer. 
Or breathe one breath of yours upon my verse. 
And leave its odour there. 



WHITMAN 243 

His verse, like the sea, is like the winds also, and like life. 
Its eager forward propulsions are as his own vision of joy. 
It has that energy which Baudelaire called the supreme 
grace. Only because laggard criticism sometimes denies 
his magnificent art, is it necessary to insist on his form and 
be curious of metrical questions. One must stand back 
to see, to comprehend, him. As a portrait viewed close 
disintegrates into ridges and smears of paint, as Rodin's 
sculpture is not for the microscope, so Whitman's lines can 
be analyzed, pulverized to lifelessness. They should be 
chanted aloud in a large free way. 

No reader of Whitman can neglect his prose, for like all 
great poets he writes excellent prose. He is an admirable 
direct judge of men and events, of other poets. Intensely 
serious, almost humourless in his poetry, he is in his prose 
a genial, off-hand speaker, full of fun, at once burly and 
gentle. And he is often poetically eloquent in his prose, 
throwing off a great phrase, suggesting, as if casually, a 
splendid idea, the unused surplus of poetic material which 
lies inexhaustible in the minds of very great poets. "Demo- 
cratic Vistas" and "Specimen Days" are collections of obser- 
vations and jottings, great books, as Jonson's "Timber" 
is a great book. Almost every paragraph is pregnant — 
from his dreadfully real and beautifully patient accounts 
of the "real war that will never get in the books," to his 
dreamy detached musings on the sea and the stars. It 
would be profitable for those interested in Whitman but still 
perplexed by questions of form (irrelevancies with which 
earnest readers of literature are needlessly filled up, to the 



244 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

clotting and clogging of their native senses), to compare 
Whitman's own prose with his poetry and thus understand 
their essential differences. The prose is often fine, oracular, 
full of terse metaphors and long free undulations, but its 
accent is the accent of words spoken, not sung. 

"The spread of waves and gray -white beach, salt, monoto- 
nous, senseless — such an entire absence of art, books, talk, 
elegance — so indescribably comforting, even this winter 
day — grim, yet so dehcate-looking, so spiritual — striking 
emotional, impalpable depths, subtler than all the poems, 
paintings, music I have ever read, seen, heard. (Yet 
let me be fair, perhaps it is because I have read those poems 
and heard that music.)" There is text for a whole essay 
about Whitman in that one passage. 

Wliitman was a great talker, and his friends have remem- 
bered many of his words and recorded them. Mr. Horace 
Traubel, his devoted friend and biographer, took down his 
conversations Boswell-fashion, and is printing volume after 
volume of them. There is a difference between Mr. Traubel's 
work and Boswell's, a difference in Mr. Traubel's favour. 
Whitman is a much greater, more original man than Doctor 
Johnson. Moreover, Boswell selected and made a work of 
balanced art out of the materials of his hero's life. When 
Johnson said stupid things and Boswell had sense enough 
to know they were stupid, he discreetly omitted them. 
Mr. Traubel goes at his task in a manner appropriate to 
Wliitman and to the new ideal of realism in biography. 
He sets down everything that he can remember. If you do 
not wish to read it, that is your affair. But it is all set 



WHITMAN 245 

down, and if you do not read it you miss the richest intellect 
in America. Whitman's character requires no suppressions. 
He bears every test of a method of publicity which is neither 
hero- worshipful nor "pitiless," but simply matter-of-fact 
and indiscriminate as nature. Capable like all great souls of 
deep reticence, in spite of his garrulous candour, Whitman 
moved at ease among books and men, and spoke his ample 
mind, challenging men and things less and loving them more 
as he grew to full stature and became the nurse of men 
and the celebrant of Lincoln, laureate and national chief 
of equal height. Then, stricken with paralysis as a result 
of his labours during the war, he hved to a softened, benig- 
nant old age, a powerful personality even when "laid up on 
the beach," fulfilling, more nearly than the man who phrased 
it, the ideal of a poet who makes his life a poem. 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Walter Whitman was bom on Long Island, New York, 
May 31, 1819, and died at Camden, New Jersey, March 25, 
1892. He had no "education" beyond the primary schools. 
He spent his youth reading, observing, loafing. He was 
for a time a school teacher, a compositor and an editor. 
He edited the Brooklyn Eagle in 18)54-8. The next year he "^i 
tramped over the country west to the Great Lakes, south 
to New Orleans, supporting himself by free-lance contribu- 
tions to newspapers. In 1851-52 he owned and edited a 
newspaper in Brooklyn, He spent some time as carpenter 
and builder. During the war he wrote for the newspapers 
and was volunteer nurse in the hospitals at Washington. 



246 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

He was clerk in several departments of the Government at 
Washington from 1865 to 1874, when he was stricken with 
partial paralysis. He lived the rest of his life at Camden, 
New Jersey. His poetry meant a practical as well as an 
intellectual fight. It involved him in trouble with one 
chaste official at Washington on whom he depended for his 
clerkship, but his friends got him a place in another depart- 
ment. In Boston his publishers, Osgood and Company, 
were legally compelled to withdraw his book from circulation 
because he refused to consent to the omission of passages 
indicated by the District Attorney. The meddlers who 
made complaint were the vicious Society for the Suppression 
of Vice. The Boston postmaster who excluded the book 
from the mail was directed from Washington to admit it. 
The result of official interference was to advertise Whitman's 
poetry and make officialdom look as foolish as he always 
believed it to be long before he personally felt its imperti- 
nence and "the never ending audacity of elected persons." 
The last years of his Hfe were peaceful and were made happy 
by appreciation. 

His works are: Leaves of Grass, 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 
1871, 1882, 1883; Drum Taps, 1865; Passage to India, 1870; 
Democratic Vistas, 1871; Memoranda During the War, 
1875; Specimen Days, 1882; November Boughs, 1888; 
Good-bye, My Fancy, 1891; Autobiographia, etc., 1892. 
Recent editions of Leaves of Grass include all his poetry, 
for he added his later verse to it as "Annexes." 

The best Life of Whitman consists of his own "Auto- 
biographia, or the Story of a Life," "Specimen Days, etc.," 



WHITMAN 247 

and his conversations, "With Walt Whitman in Camden," 
edited by his executor, Horace Traubel. The Life by 
Richard Maurice Bucke is authentic. A good study is that 
by the Enghsh writer, H. B. Binns. Stevenson's essay in 
"Famihar Studies of Men and Books" wavers between 
hearty praise and a fear that he and Whitman will be mis- 
understood, so that its effect is inconclusive. The essay 
by Professor George Santayana in "Poetry and Religion" 
is a perfect justification of Whitman's dislike of "aesthetics." 
The essay by Anne Gilchrist found in "Her Life and Writ- 
ings," quoted from above, is excellent. J. A. Symonds's" Walt 
Whitman: A Study" is sympathetic. John Burroughs's 
"Whitman: A Study" is the work of a friend and a wise 
man. William D. O'Connor's "The Good Gray Poet" is 
a fiery piece of eloquence in defence of Whitman, still good 
reading, but unnecessarily hot to a generation which does 
not question Whitman's greatness. Swinburne's attack 
published in the Fortnightly Review, August, 1887, should 
be read by all interested in either Whitman or Swinburne. 
One of the best books is "Days with Walt Whitman" by the 
English poet and philosopher, Edward Carpenter. Many 
opinions of Whitman are collected in "In Re Walt Whit- 
man," edited by the literary executors, Traubel, Bucke, and 
Harned. 



CHAPTER XIII 
MARK TWAIN 

"Gulliver's Travels" is to be found in two editions, 
one for adult minds, the other for adventurous immaturity. 
The texts differ but little, if at all; differences are mainly 
differences in the reader. For one audience "Gulliver's 
Travels" is a story book hke "Robinson Crusoe" and 
"Treasure Island." For the other audience it is a tremen- 
dous satire on human nature, a vast portrait of man, the 
nakedly simple narrative uttering profundities before which 
the sentimental quail and hypocrites wear an unhappy smile. 
The boy who follows the strange fortunes of Doctor Gulliver 
does not know that Swift is talking over his head to the par- 
ents who gave the boy the wonder book. All satire is dual in 
its nature. It speaks in parable, saying one thing and mean- 
ing a deeper paralleUsm. It is a preacher in cap and bells. 

To the holiday mood of the world and the wholesomely 
childish popular mind Mark Twain's books, hke "Gulliver's 
Travels," appeal instantly. For forty years he has been a 
favourite comedian, a beloved jester, picturesque, histrionic 
in all his public attitudes. His books have been sold by 
hundreds of thousands. Of "Joan of Arc," one of his least 
popula? books ("I wrote it for love," he says, "and never 
expected it to sell"), sixteen thousand copies were sold in 

248 



MARK TWAIN 249 

the years from 1904 to 1908. Mark Twain was the most 
successful man of letters of his time; in the duration and 
variety of his powers, in the number and enthusiasm of his 
audience he has no rival in English hterature after Dickens. 

To say in the face of that towering popularity that he is 
greater than his reputation may seem praise beyond reason, 
and it may be presumptuous to suggest that the millions who 
admire him do not all know how great a man they admire or I 
what in him is most admirable. Nevertheless it is true that' 
this incorrigible and prolific joker has kept the world 
chuckhng so continuously that it has not sobered down to 
comprehend what a powerful, original thinker he is. If you 
mention his name, some one says, "Oh, yes! do you remem- 
ber what he said when it was reported that he was dead.''" 
You smile appreciatively and insist, "Yes, but have you read 
'Joan of Arc'.'* Have you really read, since you grew up, 
the greatest piece of American fiction, 'Huckleberry Finn'.f*" 
The response is apt to be more willing than intelhgent. 
Some men of letters, like Mr. Bernard Shaw, and some critics, 
such as Professor W. L. Phelps and Professor Brander 
Matthews, have measured his significance. Mr. Howells, 
after warning us not to forget the joker in the gravity of our 
admiration, said it all in a few words, " Clemens, the sole and 
incomparable, the Lincoln of our hterature." Other critics 
remain truer to the critic type by condescending to con- 
temporary greatness and reserving highest praise for Mark 
Twain's equals who lived long ago, Swift, Mohoje, Cer- 
vantes, Fielding. As an example of the timid ineptitude of 
critics in the presence of living greatness, I quote from a 



250 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

handbook of American literature published five or six years 
ago. In it "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" 
is called a "cruel parady of Malory's 'Morte d'Arthur.' " It 
is not cruel and it is not a parody; in other respects the criti- 
cism is profoundly true. "It is unfortunate" — says the 
same handbook — "it is unfortunate for Mr. Clemens that 
he is a humorist; no one can ever take such a man seri- 
ously." It is unfortunate; just as it is a burning shame that 
Lamb was not an epic poet and that Swift was not a church 
historian. 

To take humorists seriously is superficially incongruous. 
We should approach all satirists from Aristophanes to George 
Meredith in a spirit of gay dehght. If we talk too solemnly 
about them, their spirits will wink us out of countenance. 
However, it is a well-established custom to discuss masters 
of humour, who have been dead a long time, as if they were 
really important in the history of human thought; and, with- 
out a too ponderous solemnity, one may seriously praise and 
expound the wisdom of the great laugh-maker who died two 
years ago. 

Mark Twain began as a newspaper reporter, a "funny- 
column" man. He was a natural story-teller; his dehghtful, 
flexible voice was a melancholy vehicle for outrageous ab- 
surdities, and the mask of a grieved and puzzled counte- 
nance was a gift of the gods to a platform humorist. His 
natural talents of mind and manner made him successful on 
the Pacific Coast before he thought of himself as a profes- 
sional man of letters. As he grew older, he cultivated the 
gifts which he had discovered by accident, came in time to a 



MARK TWAIN 251 

perfect and conscious command of his art, and by mucTi 
reading and writing and experience made himself a very 
great master of prose. 

His first book of sketches, printed in 1867, is of no better 
quality than the work of hundreds of newspaper men who 
put a little fun into their day's scribbling and so get a httle 
fun out of it. The sketches had given Clemens a local repu- 
tation before they were printed as a book, and prompted the 
proprietors of the Alta California to send him on the famous 
voyage of the steamer Quaker City. The report of that 
voyage is "Innocents Abroad," a first-rate book of travel,' 
which revealed at once an accomphshed writer of sincere, 
vigorous Enghsh. As if the spirit of incongruities had con- 
spired to make fun doubly funny, "Innocents Abroad" has 
been regarded, by those who read with any part of their 
organism except their intellect, as an expression of American 
irreverence grinning at the august beauties of Europe. So 
far as it is disrespectful, its satire is aimed at the dishonest i 
American tourist, at the gaping pretender who feigns to see 
beauty where it is not, or where he does not see it, and misses 
beauty where it is. Upon the "pilgrims" with their fraud- i 
ulent enthusiasms, their vandal thefts of " souvenirs" from 
places that they call sacred, the clerk of the party pours his 
scornful ridicule. To swindlers who exploit art and antiq- 
uity for the sake of the tourist's dollar he gives no quarter. 
Romances that thoughtless people accept as lovely but which 
are essentially base, like the story of Abelard, he tears to 
shreds. The unshakable reaHst here begins to deal those 
blows to sentimentality and pretension which ring through 



252 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

all his work to the last.* Disingenuous books of travel he 
piles in a heap, sets fire to them and dances round the pyre. 

"Nearly every book concerning Galilee and its lake de- 
scribes the scenery as beautiful. No — not always so 
straightforward as that. Sometimes the impression inten- 
tionally conveyed is that it is beautiful, at the same time 
that the author is careful not to say that it is, in plain Saxon. 
But a careful analysis of these descriptions will show that 
the materials of which they are formed are not individually 
beautiful and cannot be wrought into combinations that are 
beautiful. The veneration and the affection which some of 
these men felt for the scenes they were speaking of heated 
their fancies and biased their judgment; but the pleasant 
falsities they wrote were full of honest sincerity at any rate. 
Others wrote as they did, because they feared it would 
be unpopular to write otherwise. Others were hypocrites 
and deliberately meant to deceive. Any of them would say 
in a moment, if asked, that it is always right and always best 
to tell the truth. They would say that, at any rate, if they 
did not perceive the drift of the question. But why should 
not the truth be spoken of this region.'^ Is the truth harm- 
ful.'^ Has it ever needed to hide its face.^* God made the 
Sea of Galilee and its surroundings as they are. Is it the 
province of Mr. Grimes to improve upon the work.?* I am 
sure, from the tenor of the books I have read, that many 
who have visited this land in years gone by were Presby- 
terians, and came seeking evidences in support of their 

*Be it noted, as is proper in a consideration of a master of irony and hater 
of sham, that Mark Twain was himself a sentimentalist at least once, in 
"A Dog's Tale." 



MARK TWAIN 253 

particular creed; they found a Presbyterian Palestine, and 
they had already made up their minds to find no other, 
though possibly they did not know it, being blinded by their 
zeal. Others were Baptists, seeking Baptist evidences and 
a Baptist Palestine. Others were Catholics, Methodists, 
Episcopalians, seeking evidences indorsing their creeds, and 
a Catholic, a Methodist, an Episcopalian Palestine. Honest 
as these men's intentions may have been, they were full of 
partialities and prejudices, they entered the country with 
their verdicts already prepared, and they could no more 
write dispassionately and impartially about it than they 
could about their owti wives and children. Our pilgrims 
have brought their verdicts with them. They have shown it 
in their conversation ever since we left Beirout. I can al- 
most tell, in set phrase, what they will say when they see 
Tabor, Nazareth, Jericho, and Jerusalem — because I have 
the books they loill ' smouch'' their ideas from. These authors 
write pictures and frame rhapsodies, and lesser men follow 
and see with the author's eyes instead of their own, and 
speak with his tongue." 

The passage expresses Mark Twain's lifelong attitude 
toward books and men. He looked on the world with a 
serious, candid and penetrating eye, analyzing the human 
fool, affectionately tolerant of his folly except when it is 
mixed wath meanness and cruelty. In a letter he wrote 
shortly before his death he said, referring to his book on 
Shakespeare: "In that booklet I courteously hinted at the 
long-ago well established fact that even the most gifted hu- 
man being is merely an ass, & always an ass, when his for- 



254 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

bears have furnished him an idol to worship. Reasoning 
cannot convert him, facts cannot influence him. I wrote 
the booklet for pleasure — not in the expectation of con- 
vincing anybody that Shakespeare did not write Shake- 
speare. And don't you write with any such expectation. 
Such labors are not worth the ink & the paper — except when 
you do them for the pleasure of it. Shakespeare the Strat- 
ford tradesman will still be the divine Shakespeare to our 
posterity a thousand years hence." 

In "Innocents Abroad," the self-deceptions and pious 
buncome of the pilgrims, the mendacious guides, the "tall " 
traditional stories told for money to tourists by vergers and 
ciceroni (stories beside which "American exaggeration" is 
shrinking understatement) — all these impositions move the 
recording Innocent to cut capers, to play the vacant idiot, 
and then to pour out one of his level streams of deadly ac- 
curate and demolishing irony. It is a pleasure to read him 
in his abusive moods, and it was a greater pleasure to hear 
him in one of liis coolly passionate tirades, speaking sentences 
amazingly finished and constructed as if a prose style were 
as natural to him as breathing, in a voice even, deUberate, 
modulated and sweet with rage. 

Besides much excellent fooling and vigorous destruction 
of what is revered but not reverend, there is in "Innocents 
Abroad" a good deal of fine, clear description of things seen. 
Indeed the book is on the whole a serious report of sights and 
events. The characterization of the pilgrims reveals the 
gift that was later to draw shrewd portraits of human beings, 
real and fictitious. Mark Twain shows in this book, as in 



MARK TWAIN 255 

much of his writing, the deep enthusiasm for natural beauty 
which is impossible to people who can harbour dishonest 
admirations. The description of Vesuvius is powerful, 
graphic, as fresh as if no other man had seen and described it. 

Clemens's next book, "Roughing It," is "merely a per- 
sonal narrative" describing "the rise, growth and culmination 
of the silver mining fever in Nevada." It appeared at the 
time when Bret Harte was capturing the fancy of unso- 
phisticated readers with his delightful, disingenuous tales 
of the Wild West. "O. Henry," in some respects a better 
story-teller than Bret Harte, has said that the editors of New 
York magazines (and their Eastern readers) are so naively 
ignorant that in a cowboy yarn the author can stab a man 
with a lariat and they will not know the difference. To 
this romantic ignorance Bret Harte appealed with pictures of 
a theatric California and portraits of miners such as never dug 
in the real earth. His tales are skilfully written, humorous, 
quasi-pathetic and engagingly readable, but they are made 
"for export" to people who do not know the flavour of better 
native wines. In his book, "Is Shakespeare Dead?" Mark 
Twain says: "I know the argot of the quartz-mining and 
milling industry familiarly; and so whenever Bret Harte 
introduces that industry into a story, the first time one of 
his miners opens his mouth I recognize from his phrasing 
that Harte got the phrasing by listening — like Shakespeare 
— I mean the Stratford one — not by experience. No one 
can talk the quartz dialect correctly without learning it with 
pick and shovel and drill and fuse." 

Harte 's unreaUty is deeper than that; he is a sentimen- 



256 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

talist, who makes untrustworthy assays of man and society. 
He mistakes the iron pyrites of melodrama and farce for the 
gold-bearing quartz of human nature. This is not to deny 
Bret Harte's merits, which are genuine if not of a high order. 
He is not exceptional in his attitude toward life and toward 
fiction. Too many American story-tellers of considerable 
literary skill are thinly romantic; they move in regions of 
artificial adventure and moonlit emotion. Only in the last 
quarter of the nineteenth century did the spirit of realism 
find itself at home among a people reputed to be sensible 
and practical, but really sentimental and foolish and content 
with a conduct of private and public affairs that fills an intelli- 
gent business man with despair. Their thinking is childish, 
and they swallow with delight any silly story, whether it is 
presented as a work of fiction or a fact of history and govern- 
ment. 

The first strong voice of realism in the western part of 
America is Mark Twain, and "Roughing It" is its first ex- 
pression — a statement that some Americans would prob- 
ably meet by pointing out that Mark Twain changes the 
names t)f Nevada people and invents things that really did 
not happen! Imagination is wasted on a people who hug 
Mark Twain's jokes as a child hugs a jumping-jack and do 
not know that "Roughing It" is an important social study, 
reconstructing in its own unmethodical fashion a phase of 
American history, a section of the national life. Under the 
touch of a great instinctive humourist, whose vision is sharp 
and undeluded, whose lively caricature plays over a cold 
sense of fact, the silver boom-town, its comedy and tragedy. 



MARK TWAIN 257 

takes permanent and accurate shape for the benefit of an 
inquisitive posterity that will wish to study our social 
history. 

In "The Gilded Age" Mark Twain and Charles Dudley 
Warner worked together two claims, only one of which shows 
real metal. The story is of two sets of characters brought to- 
gether in a forced and unconvincing unity. The young 
people from the east with their commonplace love affairs 
figure in one plot, which crosses the fortunes and misfortunes 
of Colonel Sellers and his family. Everything in the book 
except Colonel Sellers may be sacrificed without great loss 
to literature. Sellers is a colossal comic creation, the em- 
bodied spirit of western mushroom hopes and bubble enter- 
prise. The type is so true to human nature, and especially 
to American human nature in a land of rapid haphazard 
exploitation, sudden wealth and disastrous "progress," that 
the authors were besieged with claimants for the honour of 
having sat as model. There was a real person, a kinsman 
of Clemens, who suggested the character, but there was no 
model except perennial humanity. The book as a whole 
is amateurish and lacking in cohesion. One suspects that 
Colonel Sellers kept the two humourists gayly interested in 
the work, and that they made up the rest of the book in a 
perfunctory way at a low pitch of creative enthusiasm. 
Some years later in "The American Claimant" Mark Twain 
brought Colonel Sellers on the stage again. In this book, as 
in "The Gilded Age," the story is nothing (unless it is a 
"cruel parody" of "Little Lord Fauntleroy"). But Sellers 
IS himself, generous and pathetically lovable, for all his 



258 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

sham wisdom and magniloquent inflation. He is, like Don 
Quixote and some of Dickens's characters, drawn taller than 
life-size, but he is true to the outlines of humanity, a 
pantographic enlargement of man. 

The delight with which the public received Colonel Sellers 
encouraged Clemens to try another work of fiction. He 
wrote one of the best of boys' books, "Tom Sawyer." The 
adventure in the cave and the finding of gold are the good old- 
fashioned stuff of dime novels. Mark Twain, like that other 
wise man with the heart of a boy, Stevenson, has taken the 
traditional boy romance and made it literature. Except 
for its one afiluent adventure in treasure-trove, the book is 
all actual boy life, a masterly biography of the universal 
youngster. The adult novel in America is not yet adult, 
but four men of letters, Aldrich, Warner, Mr. Howells and 
Mark Twain, have limned us immortally as we all were in 
the golden age. It may be that "Tom Sawyer" and "Huck- 
leberry Finn," Aldrich's "Story of a Bad Boy," Howells's 
"Flight of Pony Baker," and Warner's "Being a Boy" are 
the reaction of humour and naturalism against the era of St. 
Rollo. 

Like all true books about boys, "Tom Sawyer" gives 
glimpses of the social conditions and habits of the older gener- 
ation. There are wider glimpses in "Huckleberry Finn." 
Indeed this is more than a boy's book or a book about boys- 
It is a study of many kinds of society seen through eyes at 
once innocent and prematurely sage. Those who are fond 
of classifying books may see in "Huckleberry Finn" a new 
specimen of the picaresque novel of adventure; some clas- 



MARK TWAIN 259 

sifiers, going back further for analogies, have called it the 
"Odyssey of the Mississippi," which is strikingly inept. It 
is a piece of modern realism, original, deep and broad, and it 
is in American literature deplorably solitary. It is one of 
the unaccountable triumphs of creative power that seem to 
happen now and again, as "Robinson Crusoe " happened, 
and the surrounding intellectual territory has not its com- 
rade. 

Huck's dialect is a marvel of artistry. As Clemens says 
in a significant preface, the shadings in the dialects reported 
by Huck "have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by 
guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy 
guidance and support of personal familiarity with these 
several forms of speech." To maintain Huck's idiom and 
through it to describe a storm on the Mississippi with intense 
vividness; through the same dialect to narrate the tragic 
feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons; to 
hint profound social facts through the mouth of a boy and 
not violate his point of view — this is the work of a very 
great imagination. Huck's reflection on Tom Sawyer's 
proposal to "steal a nigger out of slavery" is a more dramatic 
revelation of the slaveholder's state of mind than "Uncle 
Tom's Cabin," and expresses more powerfully than a thou- 
sand treatises the fact that "morahty" is based on economic 
and social conditions. 

"Well, one thing was dead sure, and that was that Tom 
Sawyer was in earnest, and was actually going to help steal 
that nigger out of slavery. That was the thing that was too 
many for me. Here was a boy that was respectable and well 



260 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

brung up; and had a character to lose; and folks at home that 
had characters; and he was bright and not leather-headed; 
and knowing and not ignorant; and not mean, but kind; and 
yet here he was, without any more pride, or rightness, or 
feeling, than to stoop to this business, and make himself a 
shame, before everybody." 

Colonel Sherburn's speech to the crowd that came to 
lynch him is a sermon on cowardice and valour delivered to 
the American bully. It is Mark Twain uttering one of his 
favourite ideas through the Colonel. (Perhaps Huck would 
not have reported the Colonel's words so accurately.) 

"They swarmed up in front of Sherburn's palings as thick 
as they could jam together, and you couldn't hear yourself 
think for the noise. It was a little twenty-foot yard. Some 
sung out, ' Tear down the fence ! tear down the fence ! ' Then 
there was a racket of ripping and tearing and smashing, and 
down she goes, and the front wall of the crowd begins to roll 
in like a wave. 

"Just then Sherburn steps out on to the roof of his 
httle front porch, with a double-barrel gun in his hand, 
and takes his stand, perfectly ca'm and deliberate, not 
saying a word. The racket stopped, and the wave sucked 
back. 

"Sherburn never said a word — just stood there, looking 
down. The stillness was awful creepy and uncomfortable. 
Sherburn run his eye slow along the crowd; and wherever it 
struck, the people tried to outgaze him, but they couldn't; 
they dropped their eyes and looked sneaky. Then pretty 
soon Sherburn sort of laughed; not the pleasant kind, but 



MARK TWAIN 261 

the kind that makes you feel Uke when you are eating bread 
that's got sand in it. 

"Then he says, slow and scornful: 

" ' The idea of you lynching anybody ! It's amusing. The 
idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man I 
Because you're brave enough to tar and feather poor friend- 
less cast-out women that come along here, did that make 
you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a 
man ? Why, a man's safe in the hands of ten thousand of 
your kind — as long as it's daytime and you're not behind 
him. 

"'Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was 
born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so 
I know the average all around. The average man's a cow- 
ard. In the North he lets anybody walk over him that 
wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to 
bear it. In the South one man, all by himself, has stopped a 
stage full of men in the daytime, and robbed the lot. Your 
newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think 
you are braver than any other people — whereas you're just 
as brave, and no braver. Why don't your juries hang mur- 
derers.'* Because they're afraid the man's friends will shoot 
them in the back, in the dark — and it's just what they 
wauM do. 

"'So they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, 
with a hundred masked cowards at his back, and lynches 
the rascal. Your mistake is that you didn't bring a man 
with you; that's one mistake, and the other is that you didn't 
come in the dark and fetch your masks. You brought part 



262 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

of a man — Buck Harkness, there — and if you hadn't had 
him to start you, you'd a taken it out in blowing. 

"'You didn't want to come. The average man don't 
Hke trouble and danger. You don't like trouble and danger. 
But if only half a man — like Buck Harkness, there — shouts 
"Lynch him! lynch him!" you're afraid to back down — 
afraid you'll be found out to be what you are — cowards 
— and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that 
half-a-man's coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing 
what big things you're going to do. The pitifulest thing out 
is a mob; that's what an army is — a mob; they don't fight 
with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's 
borrowed from their mass, and from their oiSScers. But a 
mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness. 
Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go 
home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching's going to be 
done it will be done in the dark. Southern fashion; and when 
they come they'll bring their masks, and fetch a man along. 
Now leave — and take your half-a-man with you' — tossing 
his gun up across his left arm and cocking it when he says 
this. 

"The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all 
apart, and went tearing off every which way, and Buck 
Harkness he heeled it after them, looking tolerable cheap. I 
could a stayed if I wanted to, but I didn't want to.'* 

"The Prince and the Pauper," which like "Huckleberry 
Finn," is read with dehght by children, is a parable in democ- 
racy. Lazarus and Dives, in the figures of two pretty boys, 
change places, and for once the mighty learn by experience 



MARK TWAIN 263 

how the other half lives. The same idea is dramatized in 
"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," where 
the king, incognito, goes out among the people. Mark 
Twain hated the lords of the earth. In "The Czar's Solil- 
oquy" his hatred is at a white heat. In the course of one of 
those enchanting monologues with which he entertained his 
guests he said that every Russian child should drink in with 
his mother's milk the resolution to kill a czar, "until every 
Romanoff would rather sit on a stool in his back yard than 
on a throne of crime." He laughed also at the hypocrisy 
of false repubhcanism and proved that every democrat loves 
a lord and why. Humanity, ridiculous, pathetic and pre- 
tentious, is all divided into castes, each caste merciless and 
snobbish. Its portrait is drawn in this passage from "A 
Connecticut Yankee": 

"Toward the shaven monk who trudged along with his 
cowl tilted back and the sweat washing his fat jowls, the 
coal-burner was deeply reverent; to the gentleman he was 
abject; with the small farmer and the free mechanic he was 
cordial and gossipy; and when a slave passed by with a 
countenance respectfully lowered, this chap's nose was in 
the air — he couldn't even see him. Well, there are times 
when one would hke to hang the whole human race and 
finish the farce." That is written not about a mythical 
England of the dark ages, but about us. The book is a 
satire on society. Two conditions of uncivilization are 
thrown into grotesque contrast primarily for the fun of it 
all, and also for the sake of flaying priesthood and kingship. 
The book is not a "parody" of "Morte d'Arthur," and it 



264 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

is not cruel. Mark Twain would not have been so witless 
as to parody a harmless old book; he is not interested in 
Malory, but in man, and especially in the conflict between 
man's intelligence and his superstitions. 

It is, however, worth noting that like all wise men who 
chance to give their opinions about books Mark Twain is a 
good critic. He touches unerringly on Malory's weaknesses, 
his lack of humour and his inability to characterize. In 
Malory Sir Dinadan is represented as having delivered a 
convulsing ballad, but Malory cannot give the ballad, or 
furnish his humourist with anything to say. Mark Twain 
seizes this chance to make Sir Dinadan the court bore. 
Sandy tells the Yankee a story which is taken from Malory, 
and the Yankee makes a comment which is a just and com- 
pact criticism of that inchoate bundle of legends. "When 
you come to figure up results, you can't tell one fight from 
another, nor who whipped; and as a picture of living, raging, 
roaring battle, sho! why, it's pale and noiseless — just ghosts 
scuffling in a fog. Dear me, what would this barren vocabu- 
lary get out of the mightiest spectacle.'* — the burning of 
Rome in Nero's time, for instance? Why, it would merely 
say, 'Town burned down; no insurance; boy brast a window; 
fireman brake his neck!' Why, that ain't a picture!" 

Clemens was a shrewd critic of books because he was a 
shrewd critic of men. He was not hypnotized by what 
other people thought of the good and the great; he thought 
for himself. The essays on Cooper and Shelley and Mr. 
Howells are better than most of the work of professional 
critics. Some of his casual remarks about books and authors 



MARK TWAIN 265 

are memorable. He disliked "The Vicar of Wakefield," 
because the misadventure of Moses at the fair is represented 
as funny, whereas it is a pathetic and touching thing when 
a boy is deceived. Clemens had no admiration for Jane 
Austen and used to argue with Mr. Howells, who adores 
her. Most people will agree with Mr. Howells, but nobody 
can forget, once he has heard it, Mark Twain's way of putting 
his disapproval: "A very good library can be started by 
leaving Jane Austen out." 

"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" has 
obvious kinship to "Don Quixote." Both books satirize 
the ideals of a spurious chivalry. Don Quixote, an idealist, 
tilts with facts and is beaten, until finally his mind is "freed 
from the dark clouds of ignorance with which the continual 
reading of those detestable books of chivalry had obscured 
it." The Yankee, the incarnation of facts, tilts with childish 
idealism and religious creduhty and is beaten! It has been 
often said that "Don Quixote gave the death blow to chiv- 
alry" — a statement which carelessly overlooks the fact 
that chivalry never existed. The state of society of which 
it is the legendary picture had passed before Cervantes; 
and if by chivalry is meant the Kterary ideal, that ideal 
Cervantes did not kill, for it survived lustily to the nine- 
teenth century. The Knight of La Mancha was product 
of a hbrary of romance which was never read by greater 
numbers of people than in the past hundred years. 

It may be that Cervantes oiight to have laughed "Amadis 
de Gaul and all his generation" off the stage. Then we 
should have been spared those poor modem imitations of 



266 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

a genuine old literature, those legends of paper kings and 
tinsel knights which Tennyson and other men of our world, 
having no real feeling for them, except in a half-hearted 
anachronistic way, could not make convincing. That 
Tennyson should have devoted a lifetime to a masterpiece 
of such flimsy stuff as the "Idyls of the King," which are 
not of the spirit of the age and therefore not vital, and that 
people should take seriously as a kingly ideal his insufferable 
prig of a hero, show that unfortunately Cervantes did not 
succeed in clarifying the English mind, whatever medicinal 
effect he may have had on the Spanish. Wagner used 
legends akin to the Arthurian for operatic purposes, and in 
his Ring he turned the stories into parables on modern 
society. One English poet, Swinburne, tried to make the 
Arthurian story truly tragic by adding to it, or imputing 
to it, a Greek fate-motive of which the old legends are quite 
innocent. In the hands of most other modem poets the 
ideals of chivalry, not being native and intensely felt, but 
merely admired through a misty hterary haze, are both 
confused and feeble. 

"A Connecticut Yankee" is a humourist's jest, not at any 
true ancient manner of thought or at any class of fairy 
tale, but at the falsification of history and at idiotic moon- 
shine held up to admiration as serious story and clothed 
in the grave beauty of poetry. Not that Mark Twain was 
a conscious critic of nineteenth-century imitation romance, 
but like all reahsts he was filled with the spirit of his time, 
and quite without intention of making romantic poets and 
other sentimentalists uncomfortable, he sends the world 



MARK TWAIN 267 

of terrijSc and really interesting facts crashing into the stage 
world of false moonhght and tin armour. The knights of 
legend, as their modern poetic champions portray them, 
are garrulous boobies and bullies. Their chivalric attitude 
toward women is a fraud that disgusts a truly chivalrous 
man. The sentimentalist who admires Arthur as "perfectly 
lovely" and who thinks it phihstine to laugh at him, will 
never understand, of course, that Tennyson's Idyls are 
commonplace and the laureate himself a tedious phihstine; 
nor will they ever understand the great reahsts, Moliere, 
Fielding, Cervantes, Mark Twain. True chivalry is possible 
only in those who detest false chivalry. Mark Twain was 
a supremely chivalrous man, a man of exquisite courtesy and 
of beautiful loyalty to all ancient and contemporary ideal- 
isms. I have read somewhere the opinion that he was 
vulgar, but the unique cannot be vulgar; moreover, as 
Pudd'nhead Wilson says, "There are no people who are 
quite so vulgar as the over-refined." Clemens has also 
been called irreverent. He ivas disrespectful of all super- 
stitions, including his own. Says Pudd'nhead Wilson, "Let 
me make the superstitions of a nation, and I care not who 
makes its laws or its songs either." 

Mark Twain was a globe-trotter; he knew all grades and 
conditions of man, and he was a reader of history and biog- 
raphy; he was early cured of the grossest of superstitions, 
abject patriotism, with which all peoples are drenched 
and with which Americans, especially, seem to be afflicted. 

"You see my kind of loyalty," says the Yankee, "was 
loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office- 



268 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial 
thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and 
care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they 
are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become 
ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body 
from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to 
shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags — that is a 
loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, 
was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was 
from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares 'that all 
political power is inherent in the people, and all free govern- 
ments are founded on their authority and instituted for 
their benefit; and that they have at all times an undeniable 
and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in 
such a manner as they may think expedient.' 

"Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that 
the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet 
holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; 
he is a traitor. That he may be the only one who thinks 
he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agi- 
tate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him 
down if they do not see the matter as he does." 

That is the Mark Twain who "jokingly" said that the 
only distinct native criminal class in America is congressmen, 
the Mark Twain who despairingly predicted that America, 
having proved that it was not capable of being truly demo- 
cratic, would probably set up a monarchy in the course of 
another century, and who uttered as blasting an arraign- 
ment of American plutocracy as ever fell from a man's Ups. 



MARK TWAIN 269 

Americans, complaisant and sentimental, do not yet know 
the power of Mark Twain's Swiftian attacks on our flimsy- 
minded patriotism and religiosity. After his death he was 
slandered by nice critics who pm^vey optimism and water to 
the multitude; they spoke of his "kindly wit and humour 
which never hurt any one." From such libel may he be de- 
fended! Some missionaries, politicians, soldiers, and priests 
of several churches from Rome to Huntington Avenue, 
Boston, will, if they have read his works, tell a different story. 
Only a man whose heart is purged of counterfeit ideaUsm 
can be the lofty idealist that Mark Twain was. He wor- 
shipped truth and worthy individuals dead and living. 
His "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc" is a tribute to 
a heroine whose nobility is authentic, whose good head and 
good heart are proved by documents. It is an eloquent 
book, instinct with such reverence and passion for beauty 
as are possible in a soul that is not moved by hazy pieties or 
tricked by too easy creduhty. The tone of the book is sus- 
tainedly perfect, the style excellently managed by the same 
imagination that holds unbrokenly true the character and 
diction of Huckleberry Finn. After he acknowledged the 
book everybody saw that he must have written it, and 
pointed to the obvious Mark-Twainisms, but when the story 
was first published anonymously, many wise critics failed 
to guess the authorship. In one character Mark Twain is 
enjoying himself in his everyday manner — in the Paladin, 
the comic foil, the picturesque liar whom Mark Twain likes 
to introduce into all human company. The episode in the 
Fifteenth Chapter of the Second Book, laughter in the lap 



270 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

of tragedy, is one of those wrenching contrasts of human 
feehngs such as only the Shakespeares can draw unfalteringly. 

In the work of no modern prose writer is there wider range 
than in the work of Mark Twain — from "Huckleberry 
Finn" to "Joan of Arc." He had wonderful breadth of 
knowledge and interest; whatever he encountered he pon- 
dered. And he seems to have turned almost every experi- 
ence into a written page. When, at the end of his life, he 
came to write what was to be "the best and truest auto- 
biography ever written," he confessed in whimsical despera- 
tion that he could not tell the truth and never had told the 
truth, that as Pudd'nhead Wilson says, the very ink with 
which history is written is prejudice. He must also have 
found that he had already written in his other books as 
much of his autobiography as it was possible for him to 
write. His books are a record of his career from his memo- 
ries of boyhood to his last travels round the world. 

He wrote three more books of the desultory type of 
"Innocents Abroad," and "Roughing It" — namely, "A 
Tramp Abroad," "Life on the Mississippi," and "Following 
the Equator." His sketches of travel are first-rate examples 
of that informal sort of tourists' essay to which in their way 
belong Thackeray's "Cornhill to Cairo" and Kinglake's 
"Eothen." Of travel books there are many; of vital ones 
there are all too few. Those few are made by great original 
talkers who find something more or less apropos to say in 
any scene they chance to visit. "Life on the Mississippi" 
is the record in "the King's English" of the country and 
types of life made even more surely immortal in the dialect 



MARK TWAIN 271 

of "Huckleberry Finn." "Pudd'nhead Wilson," a fantastic 
tale, is laid on the lower Mississippi before the war. Like 
Mark Twain's other attempts to write a novel in conven- 
tional form, "Pudd'nhead Wilson" is not well-constructed; 
it succeeds by virtue of one comic character, whose "cal- 
endar" became the vehicle of Mark Twain's epigrams. As 
he confesses in the introduction to "Those Extraordinary 
Twins," he is not a born novelist; his account of his diffi- 
culty in managing a story will make any one chuckle who 
has ever tried to write fiction. 

"The book was finished, she (Rowena) was side-tracked, 
and there was no possibiHty of crowding her in, anywhere. 
I could not leave her there, of course; it would not do. After 
spreading her out so, and making such a to-do over her 
affairs, it would be absolutely necessary to account to the 
reader for her. I thought and thought and studied and 
studied; but I arrived at nothing. I finally saw plainly 
that there was really no way but one — I must simply give 
her the grand bounce. It grieved me to do it, for after 
associating with her so much I had come to kind of like her 
after a fashion, notwithstanding she was such an ass and 
said such stupid, irritating things, and was so nauseatingly 
sentimental. Still it had to be done. So, at the top of 
Chapter XVII, I put a 'Calendar' remark concerning 
July the Fourth, and began the chapter with this statistic: 

"'Rowena went out in the back yard after supper to 
see the fireworks and fell down the well and got drowned.' 

"It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader 
wouldn't notice it, because I changed the subject right 



272 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

away to something else. Anyway it loosened Rowena up 
from where she was stuck and got her out of the way and 
that was the main thing. It seemed a prompt good way of 
weeding out people that had got stalled, and a plenty good 
enough way for those others; so I hunted up the two boys 
and said, 'they went out back one night to stone the cat 
and fell down the well and got drowned.' Next I searched 
around and found old Aunt Patsy Cooper and Aunt Betsy 
Hale where they were aground, and said, ' they went out back 
one night to visit the sick and fell down the well and got 
drowned.' I was going to drown some of the others, but 
I gave up the idea partly because I believed that if I kept 
that up it would arouse attention, and perhaps sympathy 
with those people, and partly because it was not a large 
well and would not hold any more anyway." 

Among Clemens's miscellanies are several little master- 
pieces, "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," "Eve's 
Diary," and "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." "The 
Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" condenses human ava- 
rice and human mendacity into a fable that says, "There 
you are numbered," and leaves you laughing and morally 
naked. Hadleyburg is a town lying on the east bank of 
the Mississippi River; it extends eastward to the west bank 
of the river. 

"Eve's Diary" is a beautiful piece of poetic prose. It is 
a joke, of course; the absent-minded brontosaurus is there 
to prove it, and the respectable American librarians and 
library trustees, who (owing to their lack of historical 
knowledge) objected to Eve's costume and ruled the book 



MARK TWAIN 273 

off the shelves, made the joke a perfect torture of hilarity. 
Nevertheless it is poetry. Eve's effort to gather the stars 
in a basket is such a conception as only genius is blessed 
with. The comedy of the sketch appeals immediately to 
that national calamity, American humour, which never 
was on earth until after the voyages of Columbus. Many 
Americans no doubt curl up in convulsed delight at the 
excruciating fun of the passage which closes the book; but 
a civilized man will appreciate its tender beauty. 

"forty years later 

"It is my prayer, it is my longing, that we may pass from 
this life together — a longing which shall never perish from 
the earth, but shall have place in the heart of every wife 
that loves, until the end of time; and it shall be called by 
my name. 

"But if one of us must go first, it is my prayer that it 
shall be I; for he is strong and I am weak, I am not so 
necessary to him as he is to me — hfe without him would 
not be life; how could I endure it.f* This prayer is also 
immortal, and will not cease from being offered up while 
my race continues. I am the first wife; and in the last 
wife I shall be repeated. 

"at eve's grave 

"Adam: Wheresoever she was, there was Eden." 

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" completes the 
work which satire, science, and intellectual honesty have 



274 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

been engaged in for over a century — it makes ultimate 
nonsense of the sentimentalist's Heaven. 

Mark Twain's mind was of universal proportions; he medi- 
tated on all the deep problems, and somewhere in his work 
he touches upon most of the vital things that men commonly 
think about and wonder about. As he once quaintly said: 
"I am the only man living who understands human nature; 
God has put me in charge of this branch office; when I retire, 
there will be no one to take my place, I shall keep on doing 
my duty, for when I get over on the other side, I shall use 
my influence to have the human race drowned again, and 
this time drowned good, no omissions, no Ark." His was 
the veracity of an accurately controlled extravagance. A 
destroyer of false idols, he was an idolator of beauty, espe- 
cially of beautiful women. He was a man of exquisite 
dignity, very sensitive and fine, and yet capable at seventy 
of fooling like a boy. 

The final philosophy of this lover of boys and men and 
women and cats is, as he says, "a desolating doctrine." 
That is, it is desolating to timidity, but very brave for those 
who can square their shoulders and look things straight in 
the eye. It teaches that we have an interior Master whom 
our conduct must satisfy and whom nothing but good conduct 
will leave in peace. It eliminates all extraneous bribes to 
be good. It is like the religion which is preached in a work 
by another austere moraUst — in Mr. Bernard Shaw's 
"The Showing-Up of Blanco Posnet." And it bears some 
resemblance to the humane scepticism of Mr. Thomas Hardy. 
Without studying or caring at all for official philosophy 



MARK TWAIN 275 

(and all the wiser for the omission), Mark Twain came to 
a position of ethical and materiahstic determinism which 
is rife in the thought of our time and is in one aspect as old 
as the Greek who said: "Character is fate." For his phil- 
osophy most readers quite properly care nothing. They 
care for his portrait of Mankind. And that is the greatest 
canvas that any American has painted. 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, 
November 30, 1835. He died in Redding, Connecticut 
April 21, 1910. He never went to school after his father 
died, in 1847. When he was eighteen years old he wandered 
east for a year, supporting himself by setting type. In 
1857 he became a pilot on the Mississippi. The war put 
an end to that occupation. His brother was appointed by 
Lincoln first Secretary of the new Territory of Nevada, and 
Clemens accompanied him as private secretary without 
pay. He hunted for fortune in the mines, as he narrates 
in "Roughing It," and found fortune in his pen in the 
offices of local newspapers. A quarrel with a rival editor 
resulted in a duel (nobody hurt), and Clemens was obliged 
to leave the state. He went to San Francisco and worked 
on the newspapers there. For one of them he made the 
voyage to Honolulu described in "Roughing It." In 1867 
he was sent by the Alta California as correspondent on the 
voyage of the Quaker City; the result was "Innocents 
Abroad," of which a hundred thousand copies were sold 
the first year. For the next four years he lectured success- 



276 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

fully. In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon. He bought an 
interest in the Express of Buffalo, New York, where he stayed 
a year. Then he moved to Hartford. In 1873 he travelled 
abroad and lectured in London. A later journey in 1878 
bore fruit in "A Tramp Abroad." In 1885 he put his fortune 
and brains into the publishing house of Charles L. Webster 
& Company. He was the publisher — indeed, the instigator 
and editor — of Grant's "Memoirs," which was hugely 
successful. But the business failed and Clemens assumed 
the debts of the firm, which he paid off by a lecturing tour 
in 1895-96. He spent the next few years in Europe. After 
his return to this country he lived in New York and later 
at "Stormfield" in Redding, Connecticut. 

His works are: The Celebrated Jumping Frog, 1867; 
Innocents Abroad, 1869; Roughing It, 1872; The Gilded Age 
(with Charles Dudley Warner), 1873; Sketches, 1875; Tom 
Sawyer, 1876; Sketches, 1878; A Tramp Abroad, 1880; 
The Prince and the Pauper, 1882; The Stolen White Ele- 
phant, Etc., 1882; Life on the Mississippi, 1883; Huckleberry 
Finn, 1884; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 
1889; Merry Tales, 1892; The American Claimant, 1892; 
The £1,000,000 Bank Note, 1893; Tom Sawyer Abroad, 
1894; Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894; Personal Recollections of 
Joan of Arc, 1895; Following the Equator, 1897; The Man 
That Corrupted Hadleyburg, 1899; To the Person Sitting 
in Darkness, 1901; A Double-Barrelled Detective Story, 
1902; King Leopold's Soliloquy, 1905; Eve's Diary, 1906; 
Christian Science, 1907; Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, 
1909; Is Shakespeare Dead.?, 1909; Speeches, 1910. 



MARK TWAIN 277 

Mark Twain's biography in three volumes is by his ap- 
pointed Boswell, Mr. Albert Bigelow Paine; Mark Twain's 
"Autobiography" is to be published complete, it is under- 
stood, twenty -five years after his death; parts of it have 
appeared in the North American Review. Mr. Howell's 
"My Mark Twain" is a beautiful book. An admirable 
appreciation is Professor Brander Matthews's introduction 
to the complete edition of Mark Twain's Works. Another 
first-rate essay is that by Professor William Lyon Phelps 
in "Essays on Modern Novelists." 



CHAPTER XIV 
HOWELLS 

In 1877 the Atlantic Monthly gave a dinner in honour of 
Whittier's birthday. Mr. Ho wells presided. Among the 
honoured guests were Holmes, Longfellow, and Emerson. 
The lion of the party, though nobody present knew it, was 
Mark Twain. He told an absurd story which may be read 
with elucidations ia the volume of his "Speeches." An ac- 
count of the episode is given by Mr. Howells in "My Mark 
Twain." The story represents a western miner telling a 
stranger about three "litry cusses" who came to his cabin, 
and who called themselves Mr. Emerson, Mr. Longfellow, and 
Doctor Holmes. Mark Twain assumed that because these 
three distinguished old gentlemen were present at the table, 
in the midst of an immaculate civilization, the miner's yarn 
of three impossible hoboes representing themselves as Mr. 
Longfellow, Doctor Holmes, and Mr. Emerson, would be 
funny enough and would make everybody feel jolly and take 
another drink. An arctic chill congealed the story as it 
fell from Mark Twain's lips. Nobody was offended, really 
offended, but everybody was dismal, except the three fine 
old men of whom the other guests were abjectly, pitifully 
afraid. Literature was sensible enough, for it can always 
behave in a manly fashion; but the appreciation of literature, 

278 



HOWELLS 279 

that is, the social respect for local greatness, was so unsure 
of itself, so cringing and abashed by reputation, that it had 
no true dignity, only a Bostonian stiffness. Evidently few 
large-minded and easy-natured people were present at that 
dinner. Professor Child was not there. He read Clemens's 
speech next day in the newspaper and chuckled — the only 
human laugh known to have been evoked in all New England 
by Mark Twain's tragic drollery, Clemens himself, a sensi- 
tive, self-scrutinizing, gentle man, was deeply distressed, 
and he suffered long after he left Boston and returned to 
America. Mr. Howells, the toastmaster, not only felt the 
normal discomfort which every toastmaster feels when some- 
body whom "we have with us to-night" makes a fizzle, 
but continued for thirty-five years to deplore Mark Twain's 
disastrous blunder. He seems not to understand yet what 
happened; he does not, by his account, perceive that Mark 
Twain was the only young man present who behaved like 
a wholesome human being, and that his one mistake was in 
believing that he had been invited to a pleasant celebration. 
The occasion was really a funeral. Literature was being 
buried in Boston. In thirty-five years it has not been 
reborn there. 

This Uttle "disaster," unimportant in itself, towers hke 
Bunker Hill monument in the Uterary landscape, marking 
the defeat of the local forces. It symbolizes the passing 
of an era; it is a mile-stone as well as a tomb-stone. To 
read the record of that dinner is to pull the lava off an intel- 
lectual Pompeii. Everything in the Boston mind is just as 
it was; not a thought has been engendered in any native- 



280 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

born literary intellect since 1877. Old Boston stands there 
with the paralyzed gestures of death-in-hfe survival; it has 
not even decayed; it is simply arrested, moveless, permanent, 
caught just in the moment when it was putting its last 
loaf of Uterary bread into the oven. It is real bread, a little 
soggy with the weight of the ashes, but well baked and with 
a quaint Ungering savour. This is old Boston. The million 
beings who go about the streets to-day and do the business 
of thriving modern Boston are a new people, like the Italians 
who walk above the graves of Rome; and these new Boston- 
ians have not yet begun to make literature. 

Mark Twain escaped the fall of ashes and lava and returned 
to the universe of nature and humanity. One other man, 
Mr. Howells, was rescued. Having been born in Ohio, 
he was in part immune against the catastrophe that overtook 
all thoroughgoing Uterary Bostonians. His American birth 
and training preserved him. But he has never been the 
man he might have been if he had not come under the ener- 
vating spell of obsolete pieties. Nature made him witty, 
genial, sympathetic, observant, and endowed him with an 
infallible ear for the rhythms of Enghsh prose. To read 
any of the beautiful pages of "Venetian Life" (the book 
in which he is nearest to being a poet, for in those days 
romance and youth were still a generous current in his 
soul) — then to read "The Flight of Pony Baker," a delicious 
boy's book which proves that he was incorrigibly young 
at sixty-five — then to read any of his twenty novels — is 
to get an impression of a man of rare and diversified gifts 
born to be one of the great interpreters of human life. But 



HOWELLS 281 

something happened to him — he was stricken by the Dead 
Hand in Literature. There was in his vicinity no Hve 
hterature to sustain him, to keep him in a state of courageous 
contemporaneity with the world about him. He fell back 
on the past; and even the seven or eight modern European 
literatures with which he is familiar are, as he speaks of them, 
remote, romantic, misty. He writes of Tolstoy as he writes 
of Jane Austen or Dante. He became the Dean of American 
Letters, and there was no one else on the Faculty. Huckle- 
berry Finn ran away from school and did not go near college 
until Yale and Oxford played a joke under cover of the 
academic twilight and gave him gorgeous red gowns. Mr. 
Howells was very early Europeanized and Bostonized, 
and his Ohio outlook on hfe was dimmed by the fogs of 
tradition. 

It was the letter of old Europe and old Boston, not the 
spirit, that assailed and clouded him. He read French 
fiction and admired its shapeliness, yet he caught little more 
from its intensity and candour than a virginal New Eng- 
land schoolmistress might have received. He is as innocent 
(and charmingly so) as his own Lydia Blood. He read 
Tolstoy, and he makes the amazing statement that Tolstoy 
had a great influence on him. One would hear with no less 
surprise that Hawthorne was profoundly influenced by 
Swift or that Jane Austen felt that she had been made over 
by Rabelais. There is not one trace of the influence of 
Tolstoy, of Tolstoy's body of thought, soul, purpose, method, 
power, on any page of Mr. Howells that I have read. 
Tolstoy's terrific sense of Hfe does not ripple the surface of 



282 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Mr. Howells's placid unemotional work. And his essay on 
Tolstoy is sentimental, feminine and unimpressive. 

Some one (was it Mr. George Moore .f^) has said that Mr. 
Henry James went to Paris and read Turgenev and that 
Mr. Howells stayed home and read Mr. James. This is 
malicious and probably not true as a matter of biographical 
fact. But it is aimed near the critical truth. The reahstic 
novel grew up naturally from historic roots in France and 
in Russia. It was nurtured by a veracity of mind and a 
social freedom, utterly alien to the hypocrisy and the super- 
ficial optimism of America. Mr. Howells and Mr. James, 
alert to fine achievement, admired this great Slavic and 
GalHc performance and they seem to have said: "Go to! 
reahsm is the real right thing; we will be realists." They 
thus accepted the self-imposed limitations of realism, but 
they could not accept its profound privilege of telling the 
truth. America would not perhaps have tarred and feathered 
a man honest and intrepid enough to write as Balzac, Flau- 
bert, Tolstoy, Dostoievski wrote, but it would not have 
permitted him to be Dean. Mr. Howells's realism is like 
a French play adapted for our stage; the point of the original 
is missed, and we wonder, as we watch the Frohmanized 
translation, how Frenchmen can be so dull. To take the 
method of realism without its substance, without its integrity 
to the bolder passions, results in a work precise in form and 
excellently finished, but narrow in outlook and shallow. 
Hamlet and the King's crime are both left out. 

Mr. Howells, with no American but Mr. James to invigo- 
rate him by contest or support him by intelHgent cooperation, 



HOWELLS 283 

got into a cul-de-sac; it looked like the way to a new country, 
but the way was barred. As a critic, he became the lone 
argumentative voice of a reahsm which he could not practise; 
he could not in his novels illustrate his conviction, or make 
clear what the issue is. 

The issue may be stated roughly as follows: Fiction is a 
poetic imitation of biography. It makes the magnificent 
assumption that its characters are real people and proceeds 
to tell a part of their lives. In order to maintain this primary 
assumption, it must do one of two things: either it must 
make events so entertaining that no one cares to question 
the reality of the people (as when Achilles slays Hector or 
Dido pines for Aeneas) ; or it must make the people so real, 
so verisimilar, that no one dares to question their reahty. 
Romance does the first of these two things; the kiss of the 
fairy prince is so delicious that no one asks whether there 
ever was a fairy prince. Realism does the other thing. 
It says that its people are true and are interesting because 
they are true. Truth cannot go wrong; it must hold the at- 
tention of intelligent minds, and as for unintelUgent minds, 
they may devote themselves to bridge-whist and comic 
operas. But having thrown down the gauntlet to falsehood 
and unlife-like invention. Realism immediately puts itself 
under obligation to deal with the whole truth so far as artistic 
proportions allow; it cannot slink behind timid suppressions 
and reservations and still hope to win in its contest with 
Romance. It cannot play with its left hand tied behind its 
back. To the reader of fatuous romance, Reahsm says: 
"Life is more interesting than that; read this; it is about 



284 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

life." And it must offer something really richer and more 
interesting; it must offer Tolstoy or Balzac, 

What if it offers "A Modern Instance?" It loses its case 
at once. Instead of demonstrating that life is interesting, 
that the commonplace is uncommonly interesting if you 
get under it and understand it, "A Modern Instance" 
demonstrates with fine precision that life is not interesting 
to the people that live it and that the commonplace is just 
as commonplace as the romantic had always supposed it 
to be. Living people, common or extraordinary, have 
passions. "A Modern Instance" is passionless. The people 
in it, with the exception of Squire Gaylord, are not so pro- 
foundly moved that the reader catches the contagion of 
tlieir feelings and their interests. Mr. Howells's realism, 
proclaiming the identity of Ufe and hterature (and his 
critical essays proclaim the same truth many times and in 
admirable manner), leaves the great things in Ufe out. If 
there were no more passion in the world than Mr. Howells 
recognizes and portrays, about eighty million of us Ameri- 
cans would never have been born, and, once born, half of us 
would have died of ennui. 

Mr. Howells says somewhere that he cares only for the 
thing, common or uncommon, that reveals its intrinsic 
poetry. That is a right attitude, but it is not the attitude 
of Mr. Howells's novels, for he is not a poet, as Meredith 
and Hardy and Flaubert are poets. He strips life not only 
of its false romance but of its true romance. True realism 
imaginatively understands the romantic feeUngs of people 
in ordinary daylight circumstances. A sworn champion 



HOWELLS 285 

of theatric and juvenile romance, like Stevenson, does not 
need to be argued into liking the great reaUsts, Fielding or 
Balzac; he takes to them naturally because they are rich 
and humane, because they too are men of fancy and see that 
life is full of terrific tragedies and adventurous comedies. 
Mr. Howells, narrow in his convictions and timid in his 
handling of the very passions which make great realistic 
novels, tilts his lance against Stevenson and other men of 
exuberant fancy and thinks he is fighting the battle of honest 
fiction. He is not, and the net result of his critical writings 
and his novels is to turn the battle against himself. Seldom 
in his books does he come to grips with a terrible motive 
or heart-tearing ecstasy — and people have those motives 
and those ecstasies in real life. 

In "A Modern Instance," Bartley and Marcia are under- 
motived. Bartley goes to the dogs in a true enough way, 
but his beer and his fat are not impressive signs or causes 
of the disintegration of a weak soul. The fat is a patho- 
logical fact not at all ahen to the noblest character, and he 
does not drink enough in all his recorded career to make an 
ordinary man drunk for more than a day or two. What 
is the to-do all about .f* The probable explanation is that, 
as Theodore Hook said of Wordsworth, Mr. Howells's 
"conceptions of inebriation were no doubt extremely 
limited." The degeneration of Hubbard's character, which 
was poor to start with, is sanely probable; it is not inevitable 
seen in the light of what the author gives you. One is forced 
to remember that Mr. Howells was brought up in a com- 
munity where we were taught in school that to smoke 



286 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

cigarettes was the beginning of the road to the gallows; 
and all the time we were smoking clay pipes out behind the 
barn. Marcia Hubbard must have suffered intensely; her 
jealousy is a real tragic motive, but nothing is made of it; 
her jealousy does not torture us, as does the jealousy of the 
man in Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata." Her story is plain 
as daylight, for Mr. Howells is a master of clear, self-evident 
narrative, but there is nothing under it. One can read 
her story over and over again without a qualm of sympathy, 
with not an instant of that vital contact, that emotional 
identity which is the reader's great experience in great novels. 
She is removed from the book on a pair of tongs held by 
the amiable and delightful Atherton and Clara Kingsbury. 
And we do not care a straw what became of her. The 
novehst's business is to make us feel that this poor, ignorant, 
vulgar, jealous girl is tremendously interesting as a victim 
of herself, even if she has not an intensely interesting per- 
sonality. Halleck, too, must have had acute feelings. 
But all one can remember of him is that he was lame, and 
was sorry he did not go to Harvard, and that Bartley owed 
him money. Squire Gaylord has the makings of a great 
character. He is a real man, he has a deep fundamental 
emotion. The description of him is excellent, unforgettable; 
his face looks out of the page. But his tragic cUmax in the 
court room somehow does not come off. The shrewd pain 
of the old man, which the recorded events show he must 
have experienced, is simply not in the book. 

"A Modern Instance" is the best of those novels of Mr. 
Howells which approach tragedy. It is a good novel, an 



HOWELLS 287 

important novel, but it is not great because the tragic 
motives are not realized. Its failure is not due to the fact 
that the characters are "sordid and commonplace," as foolish 
sentimentalists say about all the great ones from Balzac 
to Zola. Sordid and commonplace people, such as most 
of us are, have experiences as abysmally tragic, are damned 
with as acute capacities for suffering, as my Lord Hamlet. 
Geniuses like Dostoievski and a certain Victorian novelist 
named Dickens, whom Mr. Howells is reported not to admire, 
search out the heart of the very august tragedies in the 
breasts of ordinary folks and represent them so vividly 
that it is impossible to be indifferent to their histories. Ordi- 
nary persons in real hfe do extraordinarily interesting 
things, they have wondrously vivid sensations of common- 
place events. Modern novehsts have discovered how highly 
organized is the nervous system of a duffer, how lacerating 
are his grief and joy; they have also discovered how many 
interesting things common men do in the course of a day's 
work. Mr, Howells does not get at all this, because he does 
not know people and their day's work; he has seen them from 
his front window and in parlours, offices and summer hotels. 
Or he is imaginatively unable to grasp those great moments 
in the soul (great to the experiencing, if not to the observing, 
soul) — those moments which make the person whom the 
soul inhabits act in absorbingly interesting ways. Either 
Mr. Howells cannot or he dare not speak out about life. 
So that as the solitary, devoted protagonist of realism in 
these romantic United States he has been curiously inef- 
fectual. 



288 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Is he not, after all, a feminine, delicate, slightly romantic 
genius, theoretically convinced that realism is "the thing," 
but not equipped with the skill and experience to practise 
it? Seeing that Tolstoy writes of social problems and the 
people, he would forthwith do likewise, but he does not un- 
derstand social problems and the people. In short, he does 
not know life. He would not know how to sit down and eat 
his grub with a bunch of workmen and find out what they 
think of things. Yet, theoretically, avowedly, he is all on 
their side of the social battle. To any one who has read 
the Hterature, not the pohte literature, but the daily and the 
documentary literature of social movements, Mr. Howells's 
"Altruria" seems like the sentimentalism of a benevolent 
man, a very fine vision excellently expressed by one who 
would like to see the social world better but does not know 
the structure of the social world. A recent paper by Mr. 
Howells on war shows an astonishing oblivion of all that 
has been written about the causes of war. He lays a gentle 
hand on belhgerent men, and says, "This is not nice and 
humane." He says it for six or seven very fine pages, and 
the impression is as if an excellent, sincere, dreamy clergy- 
man should accost a girl of the streets and say: "Dear, dear, 
a fallen woman, too bad. Cannot something be done.^*" 

In "Annie Kilburn" some well-to-do people set out to 
"help" the poor. The point of the story is that they do 
not know anything about the poor and do not really sym- 
pathize with humanity. Mr. Howells is sympathetic and 
he understands the false point of view of the people in com- 
fortable circumstances. But he unconsciously reveals his 



HOWELLS 289 

own ignorance of the very people whom Annie Kilburn 
is supposed to wish to help. He does not portray them; 
he does not take us into their houses. A Russian or a 
Frenchman or one of the younger Enghsh novelists, Mr. 
Wells, Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. Bennett, would have us 
eating dinner with one of the workmen by the third or fourth 
chapter, and we should know what is thought and felt 
by the kind of man whom Annie Kilburn is trying to under- 
stand. We should see the social contrasts dramatized. 
Mr. Howells's sympathies, principles, methods, are modern, 
advanced, emancipated. His knowledge of things and peo- 
ple is as restricted as that of the New York Nation or the 
Saturday Review. Life may be a tempest in a teapot. If 
it is, Mr. Howells is one of its finest and most faithful record- 
ers. But he puts the emphasis on the teapot and not on 
the tempest, which is hardly consonant with his often 
restated, almost militant declaration that literature is life. 
He sees things from a distance; he is a sketcher, a very 
delicate farceur, a war correspondent who has never been 
in range of the bullets. 

The foregoing negations oversay themselves, unless it 
is understood that Mr. Howells takes literature with tragic 
seriousness and that he handles other authors in a very 
strict and schoolmasterly fashion; so that he is fairly to be 
judged by his own severe standards of what is worth while 
in fiction. In his book "My Literary Passions" ("passions" 
there is the only case in all his work of a misused word), 
and in his pronouncements from "The Easy Chair" and 
other seats of critical judgment he has been plain and direct, 



290 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

for all his mild manners and unapproachable tact, in his 
abuse of some very great writers. Moreover, the negations 
that are here somewhat awkwardly set down are valid, 
only on the hypothesis that we are discussing a man of 
genius, a man worth discussing, and are trying to say why 
an important, capable novelist is not a great one. Within 
his limits he is a perfect artist. His slender comedies are 
without a blemish. He never wrote a bad page, never 
wrote a sentence that any one else could make better. Mark 
Twain has expressed his merit with vigorous justice: 

"For forty years his English has been to me a continual 
delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of 
certain great quahties — clearness, compression, verbal 
exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity 
of phrasing — he is, in my behef, without his peer in the 
English-writing world. Sustained. I intrench myself behind 
that protecting word. There are others who exhibit these 
great qualities as greatly as does he, but only by intervalled 
distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and 
dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells's moon sails 
cloudless skies all night and all the nights. In the matter 
of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior, I suppose. 
He seems to be always able to find that elusive and shifty 
grain of gold, the right word. . . . And where does he 
get the easy and effortless flow of his speech.'' and its cadenced 
and undulating rhythm? and its architectural felicities of 
construction, its graces of expression, its pemmican quality 
of compression, and all that? Born to him, no doubt. 
All in shining good order in the beginning, all extraordinary; 



HOWELLS 291 

and all just as shining, just as extraordinary to-day, after 
forty years of diligent wear and tear and use. ... As 
concerns his humour, I will not try to say anything, yet 
I would try if I had the words that might approximately 
reach up to its high place. I do not tliink any one else can 
play with humorous fancies so gracefully and dehcately 
and deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with, 
nor can come so near making them look as if they were 
doing the playing themselves and he was not aware that 
they were at it. For they are unobtrusive, and quiet in 
their ways, and well conducted. His is a humour which 
flows softly all around about and over and through the 
mesh of the page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and 
makes no more show and no more noise than does the circu- 
lation of the blood." 

If in his many books Mr. Howells has not had a great 
deal to say that is significant, he has said everything he 
meant in an unimprovable manner. There are secondary 
writers who have no influence on our thinking, whose wisdom 
is not profound, whose ideas we do not vividly recall, for 
example Addison, Hawthorne, Pater. But any one with 
a sense of hterary craftsmansliip can read them with pleasure, 
reread them with increasing admiration. Such a writer is 
Howells. Even when his story is not quite compelling, his 
writing fascinates; it is a joy to watch him manoeuvre the 
English language. 

As a writer of superficial, deUcate comedy he is unsurpassed. 
"The Lady of the Aroostook" is faultless. The surface of 
it shimmers — and it is all surface. It is one of those stories 



292 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

in which American "life" is contrasted with European 
"life," but to put it so is to strain its sheer fabric. The 
international differences are played with in a deft light- 
handed way, and there is no assumption, as there is in the 
graver and richer novels of Mr. Henry James, that national 
ways and habits are being profoundly studied. "The Lady 
of the Aroostook" groups itself in the pleasantest corner 
of the reader's memory with the novels of Jane Austen and 
"Cranford." Matthew Arnold's exclamatory acceptance of 
it as a "specimen of your New England life" is a character- 
istic naivete on the part of one who was forever preaching 
the need of insight and proportion and the danger of pressing 
too heavily on merely literary evidence! There is more of 
New England life in one of Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman's short 
stories than in any of Howells's novels. 

Mr. Ho wells observes life; he is not actually or imagina- 
tively of it. His best comments are objective, pleasantly 
disdainful; from his point of view in a corner of a gallery 
overlooking the human scene he touches lightly a trick of 
character and illustrates an unobtrusively neat generality 
with a trivial action or gesture. He has amazing skill in 
making conversation clever, but not too clever to be apt 
on the lips of the postulated character. This skill is constant 
in his early comedies, "The Lady of the Aroostook," "April 
Hopes" and "Silas Lapham" and it is undiminished in 
"The Kentons," written years later. Nor is it much less 
evident in those novels which are supposed to belong to a 
different manner, such as "The Quality of Mercy"; for 
though Mr. Howells's outlook on life may have undergone 



HOWELLS 293 

radical changes, the texture of his work is much the same 
for forty years. He very early discovered a fine, definite 
narrow gift, and he has employed the gift with unflagging 
conscience and industry. There is nothing better of its 
kind than the ball scene in "April Hopes" where Mrs. 
Brinkley and Corey talk about themselves and Boston. 
There is nothing better than a haK-dozen scenes in "The 
Kentons," the conversations on the steamer, especially those 
in which one end is held up by Boyne Kenton, who is cer- 
tainly the best boy ever put into a grown-up novel, except 
Clara Middleton's friend Crossjay. 

Mr. Howells's books are of such even excellence that 
perhaps none is unquestionably best, but one vote is cast 
herewith for " The Kentons." There Mr. Howells is getting 
back home. He knows the Ohio state of mind; at least — 
since there may be no Ohio state of mind — he knows that 
one Ohio family, and it is an excellent family, in itself as a 
collection of human beings and in its artistic entity as a 
novelist's creation. Bittredge is a sort of middle-western 
Bartley Hubbard, but he is much better drawn than the 
other journalistic bounder. As for the girls, they are a 
little more warmly and humanely handled than some of the 
other young people whose love affairs Mr. Howells has 
graciously sketched. The suffering of the elder daughter 
is quite poignant and moving. On the whole Mr. Howells's 
treatment of young people in love is refreshing in a world 
full of novels the chief object of which is to get a man 
and a girl eagerly into each other's arms on the last page; 
there is a shght acidity in his management of youthful 



294 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

matings which makes for sanity and never becomes so sharp 
as to be unkindly or the least cynical. The grand passions, 
sexual or other, he does not draw and seldom attempts to 
draw; therefore he has never written a great novel. 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

WilHam Dean Howells was born at Martin's Ferry, Ohio, 
March 1, 1837. He was educated in his father's newspaper 
office as compositor and journalist. He wrote a campaign 
life of Lincoln, for which he was appointed Consul at Venice, 
where he Uved from 1861 to 1865. For the next six years 
he was associate editor of the New York Nation. From 
1872 to 1881 he was editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Since 
1886 he has been on the staff of Harper's Magazine. He was 
married in 1862 to Elinor G. Mead. 

Some of his books are: Poems of Two Friends (with 
J. J. Piatt), 1860; Life of Lincoln, 1860; Venetian Life, 1866; 
Italian Journeys, 1867; No Love Lost, 1869; Suburban 
Sketches, 1871; Their Wedding Journey, 1871; Poems, 1873; 
A Chance Acquaintance, 1873; A Foregone Conclusion, 1874; 
Out of the Question, 1877; Life of Rutherford B. Hayes, 
1877; A Counterfeit Presentment, 1877; The Lady of the 
Aroostook, 1879; The Undiscovered Country, 1880; A Fearful 
Responsibihty, 1881; Doctor Breen's Practice, 1881; A Mod- 
ern Instance, 1882; A Woman's Reason, 1883; A Little Girl 
Among the Old Masters, 1883; Three Villages, 1884; The 
Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885; Tuscan Cities, 1885; The Min- 
ister's Charge, 1886; Indian Summer, 1886; Modern Itahan 
Poets, 1887; April Hopes, 1887; Annie Kilburn, 1888; A 



HOWELLS 295 

Hazard of New Fortunes, 1889; The Shadow of a Dream, 
1890; A Boy's Town, 1890; An Imperative Duty, 1891; The 
World of Chance, 1893; The Coast of Bohemia, 1893; A 
Traveller from Altruria, 1894; My Literary Passions, 1895; 
Stops of Various Quills, 1895; Impressions and Experiences, 
1896; An Open-Eyed Conspiracy, 1897; Ragged Lady, 1899; 
Their Silver Wedding Journey, 1899; Literary Friends and 
Acquaintance, 1900; Heroines of Fiction, 1901; The Kentons, 
1902; Literature and Life, 1902; The Flight of Pony Baker, 
1902; Questionable Shapes, 1903; Letters Home, 1903; 
Miss Bellard's Inspiration, 1905; London Films, 1905; 
Certain Delightful English Towns, 1906; Between the Dark 
and the Daylight, 1907; Through the Eye of the Needle, 
1907; The Mother and the Father, 1909; Seven EngHsh 
Cities, 1909; My Mark Twain, 1910. 

Mr. Howells is happily living, so that no one has yet 
written his biography. The only good essays about him 
that I have seen are one by John M. Robertson in "Essays 
Toward a Critical Method," and one by Mark Twain in 
Harper'' s Magazine for July, 1906. 



CHAPTER XV 
WILLIAM JAMES 

William James was one of three or four important Amer- 
ican men of letters of his generation; and it is as man of 
letters and human being, not as technical philosopher, that 
we shall discuss him here. To be sure, the professional and 
the literary aspects of this multitudinously gifted man are 
not to be completely separated. So far as a maker of 
books is identified with a limited subject, he must -be judged 
by the standards special to that subject; and James was a 
philosopher; he wrote little outside metaphysics and psy- 
chology; not to discuss him as philosopher would be to 
neglect his chief importance. But when a writer by virtue 
of his personality stands forth from the technicahties of his 
subject and captures imaginations that are not wont to 
dwell in the special field where he labours, he becomes a 
man of letters. And the man of letters survives after the 
philosopher has been tucked away in museums, universities 
and other preservative institutions. 

It is sometimes the case that the lesser philosopher is 
the greater man of letters, or that the untechnical aspects 
or portions of a philosopher's work most broadly secure his 
immortality. Schopenhauer compels admiration from florid 
optimists and from idle readers of literature who care nothing 

296 



WILLIAM JAMES 297 

for his fundamental theories; whereas Kant, assumed to 
be a greater philosopher than Schopenhauer, exhausted 
every resource of human thought and the German language 
to discourage people from reading him. It is certainly not 
Plato's metaphysics, but the portrait of Socrates, the poetic, 
fanciful talk of the master and the young men, which outlive 
the centuries. If the Absolute should open its thin lips and 
declare all James's philosophy null and void, James would 
march prospering just the same, overriding with his cavalry 
charges of hving illustration all the inhibitions of philosophy 
or any creature thereof. 

"It is high time," he says, "to urge the use of a little 
imagination in philosophy." He used not little but much. 
He has the vision, the fertility, the abundance of analogy 
which he ascribes to Fechner and which he says professorial 
philosophers usually lack. Systems die, but vision is im- 
perishable. Poets speak with still living voices long after 
their private beliefs and religions have become dead issues. 
Transcendentalism is deader than Marley's ghost, but 
Emerson is not dead. "Pragmatism" may become a dead 
issue. But the great expounder of it has embedded its 
principles in vital matter, less ephemeral, less transitory 
than the stuff of many famous books of philosophy. Every 
theory, every article of faith which James declared, 
grew out of the soil of Ufe and was fostered by the most 
opulent and incandescent imagination among Americans 
of the generation that is now at three-score years and ten. 
There is only one other of William James's stature and 
originality — Mark Twain, Even the fine novelists, Mr. 



298 THE SPIRIT OP AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Howells and Mr. Henry James, are not the human equals 
of those two. 

In all departments of life which he touched William James 
was a liberator, a champion of human rights and the privi- 
leges of the spirit, a redeemer of his age frem stupidity and 
commonplaceness and intellectual tyranny. He was of the 
few who reclaimed the arid desert which American literature 
had been since the passing of their fathers' generation. 
He redeemed philosophy from rigid and jejune abstraction, 
made it alive for living people, and tried to make living 
people alive to philosophy. He was one of a small band who 
redeemed the "humanistic" departments of Harvard Uni- 
versity from the steriUty and impotence into which they 
had fallen during the past twenty-five years. The teacher, 
the philosopher, the man of letters — does he seem to shine 
the more brilliantly in all three capacities because he had so 
Uttle competition in his immediate environment.'' — because 
great teachers do not as a rule live in university communi- 
ties, because philosophers do not live in the midst of life, 
and men of letters contemporary with James almost unani- 
mously refused to be born in these United States? 

He was a great teacher in a university where (a dozen 
years ago, surely) great teachers were few. In the non- 
scientific departments there was Norton, a survival from a 
generation that read literature and knew not Ph. D's. There 
was also one teacher of literature whose merited popularity 
with his students vainly clamoured in administrative ears 
for official recognition, which is even now incompletely 
accorded. And there was the department of philosophy. 



WILLIAM JAMES 299 

These were the only men wlio produeed anything Hke litera- 
ture, who could do that which they presumed to teach. 
In his "Talks to Teachers" James says with mild irony 
that all we need to do now is to impregnate our organized 
education with geniuses; he well knew that genius or even 
a conspicuous talent is the most serious disqualification with 
which a man can be burdened if he wishes to teach in an 
American school. In his sketch of Thomas Davidson, who 
might have added lustre to Harvard had the authorities 
willed to receive him into the faculty, James protests against 
the disposition of university officials to reject men of ability 
in favour of routine professors. The reason, of course, is 
that routine professors are already in charge and they cannot 
endure the rivalry of first-rate intellects. The sections of 
the Harvard faculty which deal with art and letters, those 
departments which should have a great civilizing influence, 
which should inspire young men with poetry and beauty 
and feed their imaginations, have all been benighted in 
routine, save only the department of philosophy. Palmer, 
Royce, Santayana and James. It alone is impregnated with 
genius; its members write significant books. To a small 
group of men, and to James especially, is due the spiritual 
salvation of Harvard (or as nmch of Harvard as the faculty 
constitutes) during an administration which was hostile to a 
good deal that is important in education, an administration 
the more discouraging because so servilely praised. A true 
disciple of James should hasten to add that Harvard has not 
been guilty of any unique individual stupidity, for our mas- 
ter tells us that "most human institutions, by the purely 



300 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

technical and professional manner in which they come to be 
administered, end by becoming obstacles to the very pur- 
poses which their founders had in view." 

James's "Talks to Teachers" is one of those rare manuals 
of advice whose precepts the counsellor himself put into 
practice. He treated his pupils as human beings. He 
assumed them to be intelligent gentlemen, and by this 
assumption — it illustrates one of the principles of his 
psychology — he helped them to be so. Their views and 
interests were to him not juvenile inferiorities to which 
gowned wisdom graciously condescended; they were equal 
democratic human stuff, valuable to the man who sat on 
the other side of the desk, for he was a real philosopher 
of the race of Socrates. "In a subject like philosophy," 
he says, "it is really fatal to lose connection with the open 
air of human nature, and to think in terms of shop tradition 
only." He talked to his classes as man to man, urbane, 
gracious, witty, and withal vastly learned. He unrolled 
his wisdom without pretension, and without the wrong 
kind of reservation; to use his own words, he forgot scruples, 
took the brake off his heart, and let his tongue wag. 

The writer remembers one little accident that resulted 
from his off-hand liberal way of talking philosophy. The 
subject was a volume of metaphysical theology, a wise but 
rather dull book, in which the author had mingled together 
his traditional deity and an abstraction as shapeless as a 
cloud, and less substantial, consisting of the Babu words of 
philosophy. In the thicket of words some of us were resign- 
edly losing ourselves and we expected to be lost throughout 



WILLIAM JAMES 301 

the course. But after a lecture or two of preliminaries the 
thicket became alive, vistas opened, not toward the Absolute 
to which the book was driving, but to all manner of lighted 
clearings and glades of intelligence. The discourses were 
unmethodical, colloquial, yet the method of a mind that had 
already thought out most of the things discussed in the book 
soon became evident. The papery attributes of the figment 
in the text-book were peeled off one after another and 
thrown into the waste-basket. One day, with his delightful 
mixture of alertness and nonchalance, James was reducing 
a word to its meanings, trying to find the heart of it by pulling 
away some of its connotations. There was no heart in it. 
One student, who had not quite followed the game and still 
mistook the faceless abstraction for the god of his fathers, 
grew aghast at the process of verbal denudation and cried 
out, "But I do not see how that takes away my God." 

Professor James paused for a puzzled moment and then 
replied, "It doesn't. Your God stands on his own hind 
legs." Then he pursued the idea, often found in his books, 
that the metaphysical Absolute is like an anatomist's mani- 
kin. It can be taken apart and put together; it may be a 
useful diagram of a living being, but it is itself dead. 

Since he permitted himself such homely metaphors (indeed, 
he took pleasure in a slang trope, politely apologizing for 
its vulgarity), one may say that his philosophy stands on its 
own hind legs. And he left standing room for other men's 
convictions. He respected what stands alone, and was 
suspicious of artificial props. Exuberant foe of all ghostly 
abstractions and of reasons that smack of intellectual 



302 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

dishonesty, he deferred humbly to the faiths and feehngs of 
men. He was a learner at the feet of Ufe and in that attitude 
he kept his students. But to represent him so (the words 
are at fault) savours of a sort of pious solemnity quite foreign 
to his spirit of animated discursive inquiry. Most often 
he took his students on hohday explorations, and in the 
midst of an intellectual picnic he turned poet and prophet 
and spoke with an eloquence which no man less than a 
genius can approach. 

When his discourses take shape in print they retain their 
colloquial informality and gain heightened power from com- 
pression and rearrangement. His "Psychology," however 
solid a text-book it may be, is really a series of hterary 
essays. If the chapter on Habit were bound in a volume 
of Stevenson or Emerson, it might surprise us there, but it 
would not be inharmonious with its surroundings. Other 
philosophers talk of previous philosophers and of such 
ancient hterature as has become respectable and dignified. 
James refers abundantly to modern poets and essayists, 
Whitman, Richard Jefiferies, Edward Carpenter, Swinburne, 
Tennyson, Tolstoy, James Thomson, Thackeray, Chesterton 
and H. G. Wells. Some psychologists throw hfe into rigid 
cold shadows cast by an artificial hght; James views the world 
in the sunlight of nature which overflows and streams 
beyond the shadow-casting facts. 

His "Varieties of Religious Experience" is an anthology 
of poetry and biography, a study not of theologies, but of 
human beings; there is something capaciously tolerant about 
the book, as if the mind that made it were large enough to 



WILLIAM JAMES 303 

understand and value any sort of man, even though candour 
flatly rejected his religion. In "Pragmatism" and "The 
Meaning of Truth" and "A Pluralistic Universe," where 
he is fighting a dexterous and exhilarating battle, James 
is dignified and dead in earnest, yet capable of hearty laugh- 
ter. "My failure," he says, "in making converts to my 
conception of truth seems . . . almost complete. An 
ordinary philosopher would feel disheartened, and a common 
choleric sinner would curse God and die!" Whether or not 
one is converted to his conception, it is impossible not to be 
converted to the man. "What we enjoy most in a Huxley 
or a Chfford," he says, "is not the professor with his learning, 
but the human personality ready to go in for what it feels 
to be right in spite of all appearances." 

Much of James's work is a war of words — that is, a war 
of Hfe against words. For this task no man was ever better 
fitted. They who would "nip" Pragmatism "in the bud" 
(an operation which one critic regards as the present duty 
of philosophy) must choose sharp, hard weapons lest the 
assaulting edges be nicked on the steel they encounter. 
James outstrips all his rivals in his power over language, 
language professional and colloquial, diurnal and traditional. 
If there be reason in the old idea that clarity of statement 
is proof of truth, he is unassailably true. He has defined 
himself in his accoimt of Bergson. 

"If anything can make hard things easy to follow it is a 
style like Bergson's. A ' straightforward * style, an American 
reviewer lately called it; failing to see that such straight- 
forwardness means a flexibihty of verbal resource that fol- 



304 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

lows the thought without crease or wrinkle, as elastic under- 
clothing follows the movements of one's body. The luc- 
idity of Bergson's way of putting things . . . seduces 
you and bribes you in advance to become his disciple. It 
is a miracle, and he is a real magician." 

James, too, is straightforward, rapid, luminous; moreover, 
he has a humour rare in philosophers, a whimsical, wayward 
style of shding round venerable monuments of superstition, 
a variety and adaptabihty not only to his argumentative 
purpose, but to the moods of human beings. The expositor 
writes at his subject; the man of letters writes at Hving 
persons. James strikes like a poet at the middle of your 
nature and discovers, what only the man of sympathy 
can give you courage to feel, that the avenues of approach 
to your centre of intelligence are populous with ideas. No 
doubt his eloquence is a consolation to his opponents, who 
will take refuge in the inhuman notion that true wisdom is 
dull and that beauty is meretricious. But James has himself 
swept away the classroom fallacy that stupidity of expression 
is a warrant of philosophic profundity. His chapter on 
Hegel in "A Plurahstic Universe" is a declaration of inde- 
pendence, one article of which relates to the question of style. 
"There seems something grotesque and saugrenu in the 
pretension of a style so disobedient to the first rules of sound 
communication between minds to be the authentic mother- 
tongue of reason." 

James is a master of words, and his mastery has fitted him 
to clear away some towering structures that forbade a free 
passage to the open country. He has pierced many frowning 



WILLIAM JAMES 305 

champions and found them, like the formidable knight of 
Arthurian legend, to hold but a weak boy inside the shining 
accoutrement. He knew the core and fringes of terms and 
was not to be deceived by the fallacies involved in them. 
He dehghted to shake a philosophic word and make it give 
up its meaning or give up the ghost. Too many words, 
he thought, gave up nothing but ghosts. He hked to strip 
a phrase of its ancestral respectability, to wipe off its satel- 
litious splendours, send it into a fight with life, and see it 
come back bruised and faint. He enjoyed pulling a formu- 
lated solemnity from its precarious one-sided attachment 
to a metaphysical edifice and then scrutinizing the fragments. 
But he was destructive only in the interests of clarity and 
honesty. The superficial mistook his dexterity and lightness 
of heart for frivolity. His ready metaphor about the 
''ca^h value" of an idea has even been so far debased by a 
foreign critic as to be used in proof of the commerciahsm 
of America! As he cries, "Oh, for the rarity of ordinary 
secular intelligence!" James destroyed sanctified verbal- 
isms because he distrusted the impositions of mere words. 
His main interest was not words, but Kfe. To the ordinary 
inquisitive mind philosophy is a region of spectres and 
vapours; it is not full of substantial things. James strides 
out of the misty bog to the shining uplands of human hfe. 
He knew the world. He was a man of sound information, 
a biologist, a reader of contemporary writings and contem- 
porary events. When he spoke of political and moral 
problems it was not from an academic twilight, but from the 
highway where he walked with other men. 



306 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

In our time we are losing respect for ordinate authority. 
We expect the philosopher and other leaders of thought to 
make good. James called upon himself and his colleagues 
to give an account of themselves not only as professors, but 
as men. v Humbug is humbug," he says, "even though it 
bear the scientific name.f That confession is one that the 
common citizen has been demanding for a long time. We 
are suspicious of what James calls "the common herd of 
philosophic scribes." It was time we had a professor whose 
pages should glow with sincerity; it was high time, especially 
in New England universities, that the grand lamas of learn- 
ing should be made to realize that they live in our world, 
that they cannot withdraw to the lofty remoteness of Thibet, 
however much they may prefer the climate. We are begin- 
ning to count the cost of the inefficient church and the ineffi- 
cient university. We are trying to clear our shoddy and 
cotton skirts (which inefficient statesmanship sells to us 
at all-wool prices) from the briars of bewilderment; we are 
striving to find a way out to things that matter, to make 
our fives and schools and governments better. In this 
struggle James was a Hberator. He justified his academic 
tribe. As he jokingly says, he tried to earn his salary as 
a full professor. He was impatient with the nonsense of 
his class because he had sympathy for other classes. He 
did not try to allay, but vigorously stirred the ferment of 
rebelfion which is boiling over the walls of institutionalism 
in all parts of the world. 

Mark Twain has been mentioned in this chapter, partly 
for the pleasure of imagining the shock which the association 



WILLIAM JAMES 807 

of the two men might give to critical souls, but chiefly 
because the association is just. They are the two splendid 
figures in the pitifully small number of American humanists 
of their generation. They both had heart and humour 
and eloquence and humanity.* 

It is usual to speak of Mark Twain as a "philosopher" 
in the popular sense of the word. Professional philosophers 
ignore that sense. But James did not ignore it; he valued 
it and bade his colleagues relate their philosophies to popular 
meanings, to the experiences of common humanity. Our 
universities cannot be wholly useless when a college professor, 
a lecturer upon abstruse problems, can write as James wrote 
in 1899 in the preface of his "Talks to Teachers ": 

"The practical consequence of such a philosophy (the 
behef that the facts and worth of life need many cognizers 
to take them in) is the well-known democratic respect for 
the sacredness of individuality — is, at any rate, the outward 
tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These phrases 
are so famihar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. 
Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passion- 
ate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if the 

*It may not be indiscreet to give in a footnote an example of James's 
wholesouled manner of recognizing contemporary idealisms, of his readiness 
to throw scholarly apparatus overboard and go straight to essential truth. 
There has been much psychological, and much pseudo-psychological, dis- 
cussion of Miss Helen Keller. Professor James wrote to her in praise of one 
of her books. After some lively compliments about her "psychology " and 
her literary gifts, he said: "The sum of it is that you're a blessing, and I'll 
kill any one that says you're not!" Lest the reader far from Boston may 
take this for granted and say, "Of course; she was at Radcliffe, he was a 
Harvard professor, and Harvard professors must necessarily have been 
enthusiastic about this wonderful student " I may add that in this James 
seems to be as much an exception to the temper of oflBcial Cambridge as he 
was an exception in many other significant things. 



308 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and 
institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with 
a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and 
spirited. Rehgiously and philosophically, our national doc- 
trine of hve and let live may prove to have a far deeper 
meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess." 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

WilUam James was born in New York City, January 11, 
1842. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 26, 
1910. His father was Henry James, the Swedenborgian 
writer. Mr. Henry James, the novelist, is his brother. He 
studied at the Lawrence Scientific School and graduated 
from the Harvard Medical School in 1869. He taught at 
Harvard from 1872 to 1907, as instructor in physiology and 
anatomy, then as professor of philosophy and psychology. 
He gave the Gifford lectures at Edinburgh 1899-1911, and 
the Hibbert lectures at Oxford in 1908. In 1878 he married 
Alice H. Gibbens. 

His works are: Principles of Psychology, 1890; Psychol- 
ogy — Briefer Course, 1892; The Will to Beheve and Other 
Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897; Talks to Teachers on 
Psychology and to Students on Life's Ideals, 1898; Human 
Immortality — Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine, 
1899; The Varieties of ReHgious Experience, 1902; Pragma- 
tism — A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907; 
A Pluralistic Universe, 1908; The Meaning of Truth, 1909; 
Some Problems of Philosophy, 1911; Memories and Studies, 
1911; Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912. 



CHAPTER XVI 
LANIER 

Three volumes of unimpeachable poetry have been 
written in America: "Leaves of Grass," the thin volume of 
Poe, and the poetry of Sidney Lanier. It is treading on 
treacherous negatives to say that there is not a fourth fit 
for their society; yet I beUeve that to make an adequate 
fourth one would have to assemble in an anthology the 
finest poems from lesser lyrists, beginning, perhaps, with 
Bryant's "Water Fowl" and including, if not ending with, 
the remarkable poem published only last year, "The Singing 
Man," by Josephine Preston Peabody (Mrs. Marks). And 
a beautiful book that anthology would be, for it would con- 
tain Freneau's "Wild Honey Suckle," Parson's "On a Bust 
oi Dante," and "Dirge for One Who Fell in Battle," Timrod's 
"Cotton Boll," Stedman's "John Brown" and "Helen 
Keller," Aldrich's "Fredericksburg" and "Identity," Sill's 
"The Fool's Prayer," Gilder's sonnet "On the Life Mask of 
Lincohi," a score of marvellous httle poems by Father 
Tabb, James Whitcomb Riley's "South Wind and the Sun," 
Emma Lazarus's "Venus of the Louvre," L. F. Tooker's 
"The Last Fight," a dozen lyrics of Richard Hovey,.WiUiam 
Vaughn Moody's "Gloucester Moors," four or five poems 
by Edwin ArHngton Robinson, and some other verse drawn 

309 



310 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

from the younger rather than the elder poets. Surely it 
would be a fragrant cluster from many gardens whose beauty 
is a splendid and consoling denial that the race of singers 
is dead or shall ever die till man dies. If this anthology, 
made of poets who are somewhat invidiously and with 
wavering justice of phrase called minor, were ranked on our 
shelves with the complete works of American poets, what 
single hght could shine undiminished by the rivalry of the 
chosen cluster of perfection? Not Longfellow, nor Whittier, 
nor Holmes, nor Lowell, but only these three — Poe, Whit- 
man, Lanier. 

Lanier was a poet, always, continuously, even in his juve- 
nile verses, and his genius was unerringly self-recognized 
before the bitter exigencies of his life permitted him to 
announce himself and to prove his modestly proud conviction. 
No poet's lot, except Poe's, ever fell in ruggeder places; 
no poet, except Poe, was so alone and self-directed. A 
letter written when he was thirty-three to Bayard Taylor 
sets forth the aridity of his life. "I could never describe 
to you what a mere drought and famine my life has been 
as regards that multitude of matters which I fancy one 
absorbs when one. is in an atmosphere of art, or when one is 
in conversational relation with men of letters, with travellers, 
with persons who have either seen, or written, or done large 
things. Perhaps you know that, with us of the younger 
generation iil the South since the war, pretty much the whole 
of life has been merely not dying." 

To his father he writes: "My dear father, think how, 
for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through 



LANIER 311 

weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial at- 
mosphere of a farcical college and of a bare army and then 
of an exacting business life, through all the discouragement 
of being wholly unacquainted with hterary people and 
literary ways — I say, think how, in spite of all these 
depressing circumstances, and of a thousand more which 
I could enumerate, these two figures of music and poetry 
have steadily kept in my heart so that I could not banish 
them." 

These letters are a sad commentary on America (not that 
poets have not been lonely and discouraged in other coun- 
tries), for they not only reveal a war- wasted South, but remind 
us how very little Lanier missed at that date in not being 
associated with the men of letters of New York and New 
England. The man he writes to, like an outsider yearning 
for good company, is Bayard Taylor, a first-rate man but a 
fourth-rate htterateur. The friendliness of Baltimore finally 
gave him much that he needed, and wonder of wonders! 
Johns Hopkins University made him instructor in hterature; 
the new young college thought a true poet worthy to teach 
literature and helped a true poet to live. 

Lanier flourished alone, and taught himseK all that he 
knew of books and poetry. Indeed he learned without a 
teacher to play the flute so well that he could support him- 
self by playing in the orchestra at Baltimore, and was pro- 
nounced by professional musicians a distinguished player. 
In a somewhat florid but evidently sincere memorial the 
leader of the orchestra said: "I will never forget the 
impression he made on me when he played the flute-concerto 



312 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

of Emil Hartmann at a Peabody symphony concert in 1878: 
his tall, handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing noble 
sorrows, noble joys, the orchestra softly responding. The 
audience was spellbound. Such distinction, such refinement! 
He stood, the master, the genius!" And he had never had 
a lesson in music. 

When he died at thirty-nine he had made himself a tech- 
nically excellent musician; within ten years (for his literary 
life had scarcely begun before he was thirty) he had fitted 
himself to give lectures on the English novel, Shakespeare 
and old English poets; he had written the most original 
treatise in existence on EngUsh verse, equalled, so far as I 
know that kind of hterature, only by the studies of Poe 
and Coleridge; and he was the unapproachably best Amer- 
ican poet of his generation. If ever there was a born genius 
since Keats, it was Lanier. Let there be no sentimentahzing 
over him, for he was a man of humour, he spoke always of 
his diflflculties in a manly fashion, and when death strides 
into his pages it is an honest figure and not a personification 
of the tuberculosis against which the poet fought to victori- 
ous defeat. But if ever lamentation for a poet's death be 
justifiable, there may well be a cry of pain for the unfinished 
"Hymns of the Marshes." His voice was growing greater 
when he ceased to sing, and, like Keats, 

his angel's tongue 
Lost half the sweetest song was ever sung. 

He bided his time, he wrote little verse, he studied all 
aspects of his art intensely, patiently, with a reHgious 



LANIER 313 

conscience. How sure and strong is his growth is wonder- 
fully shown by comparing the two following poems, the 
first written when he was twenty-four and not published by 
him, and the second written ten years later, a perfect lyric: 

NIGHT 

Fair is the wedded reign of Night and Day. 
Each rules a half of earth with different sway. 
Exchanging kingdoms. East and West, alway. 

Like the round pearl that Egypt drunk in wine. 
The sun half sinks in the brimming, rosy brine: 
The wild Night drinks all up : how her eyes shine! 

EVENING SONG 

Look off, dear Love, across the sallow sands. 

And mark yon meeting of the sun and sea, 

How long they kiss in sight of all the lands. 
Ah! longer, longer, we. 

Now in the sea's red vintage melts the sun. 
As Egypt's pearl dissolved in rosy wine. 

And Cleopatra night drinks all. 'Tis done. 
Love, lay thine hand in mine. 

Come forth, sweet stars, and comfort heaven's heart; 

Glimmer, ye waves, round else unhghted sands. 
O night! divorce our sun and sky apart. 

Never our lips, our hands. 

Yet it is not for what he might have done but for what he 
did that the impartial assessment of time will sum his 
merits. It is humane to remember that he wrote "Sunrise" 



314 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

the year before he died, when he was too ill to eat and his 
temperature was at 104; then it is well to remove all the cross 
lights of biography and stand face to face with his "Sunrise," 
a poem magnificent in conception, perfect in workmanship, 
ultimate poetry. The following lines are the close of the 
poem: 

Good morrow, lord Sun! 
With several voice, with ascription one. 
The woods and the marsh and the sea and my soul 
Unto thee, whence the glittering stream of all morrows doth roll. 
Cry good and past-good and most heavenly morrow, lord Sun! 

O Artisan born in the purple, — Workman Heat, — 
Parter of passionate atoms that travail to meet 
And be mixed in the death-cold oneness, — innermost Guest 
At the marriage of elements, — fellow of publicans, — blest 
King in the blouse of flame, that loiterest o'er 
The idle skies yet labourest fast evermore, — 
Thou, in the fine forge-thunder, thou, in the heat 
Of the heart of man, thou Motive, — Labourer Heat: 
Yea, Artist, thou, of whose art yon sea's all news. 
With his inshore greens and manifold mid-sea blues, 
Pearl-gUnt, shell-tint, ancientest, perfectest hues 
Ever shaming the maidens, — lily and rose 
Confess thee, and each mUd flame that glows 
In the clarified virginal bosoms of stones that shine. 
It is thine, it is thine : 

Thou chemist of storms, whether driving the winds a-swirl 
Or a-flicker the subtiler essences polar that whirl 
In the magnet earth, — yea, thou with a storm for a heart. 
Rent with debate, many-spotted with question, part 
From part oft sundered, yet ever a globed light. 



LANIER 315 

Yet ever the artist, ever more large and bright 
Than the eye of man may avail of : — manifold One, 
I must pass from thy face, I must pass from the face of the Sun: 
Old Want is awake and agag, every wrinkle a-frown; 
The worker must pass to his work in the terrible town: 
But I fear not, nay, and I fear not the thing to be done; 
I am strong with the strength of my lord the Sun : 
How dark, how dark soever the race that needs be run, 
I am ht with the Sun. 

Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas 

Of traflSc shall hide thee. 
Never the hell-coloured smoke of the factories 

Hide thee. 
Never the reek of time's fen-politics 

Hide thee, 
And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge 

abide thee, 
And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee. 

Labour, at leisure, in art, — till yonder beside thee 
My soul shall float, friend Sun, 
The day being done. 

A blood brother to Lanier's "Sunrise" is Francis Thomp- 
son's "Ode to the Setting Sun," and I know not a third 
which so is closely its kin. These poems have much in com- 
mon, opulence, splendour of metaphor and an amazing 
virtuosity in metrical matters which in turn allies them with 
Swinburne, from whom in thought they are, however, as 
remote as poets can be. If Thompson did not know the 
poems of Lanier, it is a case of predetermined aflSnities 
which the accidents of circumstance cheated of the earthly 
fulfilment of meeting. Have they some common earlier 



316 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

master that I do not know? Or is the identity of these 
powerful metaphors less striking than I find it? 

Thompson: Whether man's heart or Hfe it be which yields 
Thee Harvest, must thy harvest fields 
Be dunged with rotten death? 

Lanier: Mulched with unsavory death. 

Grow, Soul ! unto such white estate, 
That virginal-prayerful art shall be they breath, 
Thy work, thy fate. 

One other resemblance resides in their work, in their 
convictions, the fresh vigour they have given to the symbols 
of Christianity which had well nigh perished out of modern 
poetry, blighted by the ugliness of sincere but graceless 
hymn writers and other devotees whom the pagan muses 
had abandoned in despair. And both use the symbols rather 
for their beauty than for their religious import. 

To say at once the worst that can be said of either of them, 
both Thompson and Lanier are subject to the same tempta- 
tion, or they are driven to the brink of the same danger, 
and both triumphantly avoid falling into the abyss where 
poetry ceases and mere "metricism" begins. They are 
both so abundant in fancy and overflooded with metaphors, 
and withal so adept at playing with measures, that now and 
and again their exuberance and nimbleness almost betray 
them; but because they are both austere artists and passion- 
ately intend what they say, they are saved. It is a danger 
merely and they tremble on the verge of it. One would 
gladly strike out of Thompson the too visibly crafty rhymes 



LANIER 317 

of such a poem as "To the Dead Cardinal" (strange subject 
for him to spoil with conceited fantastic versifying!), and one 
would as gladly prune out some of Lanier's internal rhyming 
and obvious assonances. In both poets, who are in the 
main steadied by the solid burden of thought they carry 
so highly on the breast of song, the fault is due to an intoxi- 
cation from the sound of words. The best of the Ehzabethan 
and seventeenth-century poets of England were not free 
from the fantastic, which is a greater pleasure to the skilful 
verse maker than any but poets reahze. In the nineteenth 
century Swinburne, in the very ecstasy of making new meters 
and reviving old ones, flies sometimes on dizzy and purpose- 
less wings, and it may be that the younger poets, Lanier 
and Thompson, learned from him his less admirable as well 
as his most admirable lessons in prosody. However, they 
sin but Uttle and — this is the all-immortaUzing distinction 
— they sin as poets, not as versifiers. 

That Lanier was a musician as well as a poet (is there 
any other professional musician in English poetry?), and 
that he expressed his theory in "The Science of English 
Verse, " are facts caught at too eagerly by those who would 
account for some of his most evidently musical arrangements 
of words. The truth about him, as about all artists, is that 
his theory followed his art; he was a poet first and a student, 
or, rather, a professor, of technic afterward. His theory 
of ver^e merely codifies, with such technical knowledge as 
only a musician has, the fact which all poets instinctively 
know and all true poetry exemplifies, that poetry is, in half 
its nature, music, and that it consists not of spoken words 



318 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

but of chanted words. Professional students of prosody 
who are not poets (and most are not) have appUed to ancient 
and modern poetry a kind of visual mathematics, and they 
discourse of Greek measures and EngUsh as if they were 
quite different things. But their laws are precisely the same; 
they are aural laws, determined by the human ear, which 
is pleased or offended musically by all verse, Greek, French, 
Enghsh, or South Sea Island, There is only one law for all 
music and for all poetry (independent of the exphcit meaning 
necessarily resident in human words), and that law is: if it 
sounds right, it is right. The counting of feet is superfluous. 
If they are to be counted at all, Lanier's way is the way to 
count. The principles he expounds were known to the ear 
that first heard Homer. Lanier's verse, being true to Eng- 
lish poetry, to the effects of English words on the ear, would 
probably have been what it is if he had never been an in- 
structor and a technically capable musician and had never 
expounded his principles. Indeed, if he had been free to 
write poetry, he would not have written "The Science of 
English Verse." A professor cannot earn his salary by read- 
ing original poetry to a class, but he can earn it by lectur- 
ing on the science of verse. 

All true artists know the grammar of their art thoroughly, 
not merely with such practitioner's knowledge as a carpenter 
has of geometry, but with the highest kind of theoretic 
intelligence, for artists have the best of human minds and are 
the final speculators about the laws which they obey. Any 
great novelist could take a month off and write a book about 
"the art of fiction," but few novehsts put themselves to 



LANIER 319 

so much trouble, because they are busy writing 
novels, and therefore the making of books of theory 
is left in the less capable hands of critics who would 
fain be literary men but cannot, to save their souls, 
write novels. Wagner has not time to write a school- 
master's treatise on harmony, and such a treatise would 
probably bore Chopin to tears. Lanier is not more 
theoretic than other poets. He was simply so cir- 
cumstanced that to keep his head up as a lecturer 
he made a book about poetry when he would un- 
questionably have preferred to give his energy to writing 
poetry. 

All modern poets have been overwhelmed by the beauty 
of ancient poets; they have fed on the classics, sometimes 
assimilating them so thoroughly as to build new tissue of 
the divine nutriment, sometimes, far too often, trailing an 
undigested pseudo-classicism across their pages. The very 
modern poets have at once a double resource and a double 
burden, for they have both the very ancient poets and the 
tremendous body of poetry in living languages, on which 
to feed and by which to kill themselves. It is a very striking 
quality of Lanier that he thoroughly assimilates his masters. 
He does not mix Shakespeare with Lanier but renews a 
Shakespearian phrase, treating the Elizabethan as a great 
thing in nature from which to draw metaphors. To put it 
another way, he does not lean upon Shakespeare; he does 
not merely reflect a moonhght beauty from great poets, 
hke those rhymsters who get a kind of borrowed sweet- 
ness into their work by writing sonnets to Shelley. 



320 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Lanier's Shakespearian metaphors sound poetic and not 
bookish. 

Old Hill! old hill! thou gashed and hairy Lear 

Whom the divine Cordelia of the year, 

E'en pitying Spring, will vainly strive to cheer. 

Again, of the mocking-bird (which Lanier by a splendid 
revolt has finally put on his rightful seat, supplanting the 
European tyrants, nightingale and skylark) : 

How may the death of that dull insect be 
The life of yon trim Shakspere on the tree? 

If haply thou, O Desdemona Morn, 

Shouldst call along the curving sphere, "Remain 
Dear Night, sweet Moor." 

Over the monstrous shambling sea. 

Over the CaUban sea. 
Bright Ariel cloud, thou lingerest: 
Oh, wait, oh, wait in the warm red West — 

Thy Prospero I'll be. 

Selection does him wrong by false emphasis, and the 
foregoing may give the impression that he is overfond of 
Uterary allusion. But the quotations I give are all there are 
of the kind. The purpose of quoting them is to suggest 
that Lanier was in a sense a fresh unschooled discoverer of 
the poets. They did not become stale with class-room 
famiharity while he was young; he loved them as part of 
nature, as Keats discovered and loved Chapman and Spenser. 
How far he was from abject worship of his poet-heroes is 



LANIER 321 

shown in "The Crystal," in which is wrought out, with 
teUing phrases that are marvels of criticism, the bold and 
refreshing idea that all the masters of song, Shakespeare, 
Homer, Dante, have much to be forgiven. That is a great 
poem in which a poet adequately praises another, in which 
he does not droop upon a greater strength, but stands, for 
one song's duration at least, the equal of his adored. Such 
poem is that "To Our Mocking-Bird," where the bird and 
Keats are identified and the Cat and Death are rebuked 
together. 

Lanier, like all his race of poets, sang praises to his fathers 
in melody. Yet he does not smell of the library. He is a 
poet of nature and of things, of the meaning of central 
present things that harry and strengthen the heart of man. 
In "Corn" for once an American poet strode into our splen- 
did native golden fields and sang what his eyes saw, and 
deeper, what the harvests of the fields can be for man. 
"The Symphony," in which the instruments he knew so 
well are soundingly suggested, is no mere interplay of melo- 
dies, but the cry of the old-new spirit of brotherhood against 
the debauchery of trade. By it Lanier becomes one of the 
goodly band of modern men dissatisfied with man's viola- 
tions of man, and his voice is strong enough to admit him to 
the still smaller band of poets who are the voices of the 
present life, of these very times — with Morris and Whitman, 
whom, alas, he did not Hke ! Oddly enough, he, the devotee 
of pure music, dared the historic theme which so many 
Americans have tried, ever since the absurd Columbiads of 
the early years of the nation, and in the "Psalm of the West" 



322 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

he did make a chant of America and Freedom which has in 
its short compass something Uke epic vision and is, if not the 
noblest of Lanier, far above most patriotic verse, and artis- 
tically excellent. 

Lanier stands alone in that era of American poetry which 
is chiefly marked by a false post-Tennysonism, an era 
of nicely made lyrics that have neither passion nor an indi- 
vidual sense of beauty. There are to-day signs of some- 
thing better, nay, distinguished specimens of something 
better, in such work as Mrs. Marks's "The Singing Man,'' 
which it is a pleasure to name again, and in Mr. R. H. 
Schaujffler's "Scum o' the Earth." If Lanier had no equal 
contemporaries, he may have successors, for when an age 
Is shuddering on its first gray verge and its day -facts he in 
the future, it is permitted to be hopeful for it. 

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

Sidney Lanier was born at Macon, Georgia, February 
3, 1842. He died at Lynn, North Carolina, September 7, 
1881. He learned as a boy to play several musical instru- 
ments, which instead of dehghting his friends and parents, 
alarmed them! At the age of eighteen he graduated from 
Oglethorpe College, a Presbyterian institution in Georgia, 
which he later called "farcical." In April, 1861, he enhsted 
in the Confederate Army and served through the war. It 
is a picturesque fact that he carried his flute with him through 
battle and imprisonment. The war broke his health, and 
he was never afterward free from consumption. Until 1872 
he was in business and in the practice of law. In 1873 he 



LANIER 323 

settled in Baltimore and supported himself as flute-player 
in the Peabody Orchestra. He lived the rest of his hfe in 
Baltimore, except for vain excursions in quest of health. 
Some pubUc lectures on hterature and some of his poems 
brought him to the notice of President D. C. Oilman, who 
appointed him lecturer on English Literature at Johns 
Hopkins University. In 1867 he married Mary Day. 

His books are: Tiger Lihes: A Novel, 1867; Florida: Its 
Scenery, History and Climate, 1876; Poems, 1876; The Boy's 
Froissart, 1878; The Science of English Verse, 1880; The 
Boy's King Arthur, 1880; The Boy's Mabinogion, 1881; The 
Boy's Percy, 1882; The English Novel and the Principles of 
Its Development, 1883; Poems, 1884, 1891; Letters, 1899; 
Shakespeare and His Forerunners, 1902; Poem OutUnes, 
1908. 

The Life of Lanier in American Men of Letters is by 
Edwin Mims. 



CHAPTER XVII 
HENRY JAMES 

There is a sort of poetic justice in the fact that Mr. 
James, a fine and exacting critic, should have evoked from 
other critics an interesting and provocative variety of 
opinion. Both for him and against him, people whose busi- 
ness it is to write about literature, have put their best 
brains forward; those who attend to him at all sit on the edge 
of their chairs, and thereby agree, however otherwise they 
may differ, that they are in the presence of an unusual mind. 
He is already a celebrated argument, and there are accepted 
cliches of him, some complimentary, some not quite just. 
In the minor humours of the press, undoubtedly vulgar, as 
he would hasten to tell us if he had occasion to animadvert 
on it, his name is, like Browning's, synonymous with obscur- 
ity, with all that suggests height of brow and a liking for the 
raffinS. It is not quite appropriate that such notoriety 
should attend the work of a man who has pursued his career 
in modest retirement, who has never stood out and fought 
for his public, like Ibsen, and who has not been rewarded 
by the popularity which helps to make notoriety palatable. 
He has won and held a small public, creating in it a taste 
for himself, as Meredith did, and being, like Meredith 
again, a fine example of the man of letters who follows his 

324 



HENRY JAMES 325 

own course and lets the people talk. The people, or at least 
the critics, have talked, whether they have read him or not. 
In a way some of his friendhest critics have done less good 
than harm, for they have a habit of assuming that to under- 
stand him one has to be a very unusually intelligent person, 
which is like the fundamental fallacy of the Browning 
societies. 

Mr. James is an American only in the sense that he 
was born and passed part of his youth in this country. 
For forty years he has Uved in Europe, and he does not know 
much about America, It is a visitor and not a native who 
wi;ites "The American Scene." The characters in his novels 
are individuals selected out of their habitual environment 
and without much of any soil chnging to their boots. The 
world is small nowadays, and since Mr. James does not deal 
with rooted people, but with persons, whatever their national- 
ity, who are in social circumstance which permit them to 
travel freely, he carries his country under his hat: and he 
can study it just as well in London as in Florence, In Rome 
as in Chicago. His expatriation is really less significant 
than Washington Irving's long sojourn abroad. 

His attitude, however, is rather British than American. 
For he takes British people more for granted. Any American 
reader feels at home with the English characters in EngUsh 
novels. Miss Austen's country families, the people of 
Trollope, of Mr. Arnold Bennett, of Mr. H. G. Wells, sit 
beside our fires and talk and smoke, make love and trouble, 
just Uke our neighbours. But when an American character 
walks into an English novel, the noveUst infallibly tells you 



326 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

in as many different ways as he can think of that this is an 
American. Though the character may do nothing but look 
at his watch or flirt with a girl, behave in a quite ordinary 
way, the noveUst gets uneasy and begins to hunt for national 
differences. American novelists do the same sort of thing. 
Mr. Ho wells always takes American people for granted. 
But if an English woman appears on the scene, he lets you 
know that she is Enghsh, not merely by stating the plain 
fact but by comments and inklings of national peculiarities. 
So marked is this tendency that Mr. John M. Robertson, 
the Scotch critic, notes and especially enjoys Mr. Howells's 
attitude toward the Enghsh. To be sure, in their "inter- 
national" novels Mr. James and Mr. Howells make com- 
ments on both English and American characteristics. They 
reveal themselves by what they take for granted. Judged 
by this sort of evidence, Mr. James "gives himself away" 
to an American as being British. 

We cannot, however, yield him from our poverty to the 
riches of the English novel. Moreover, the important 
thing is not so much the setthng of a boundary dispute as 
the fact that Mr. James, ignorant of the American at home, 
fails to make the social contrasts in which he is so much inter- 
ested. His chief interest, of course, is not in social back- 
grounds, but in individuals whom he minutely and faithfully 
studies, but when he does try to make a plunge into a 
national depth, he merely goes through a paper hoop; he is 
in the same atmosphere, not a different one. 

In "The Wings of the Dove" he brings the secondary 
heroine, the dove herself, from America. She might just 



HENRY JAMES 327 

as well have been born in an English city — wealth, hair, 
purity, intensity, oddity, fragihty and all. Her companion, 
Mrs. Stringham, the lady from Boston, may be "typically" 
Bostonian; but there is nothing about her, essential to the 
story, that might not have been born in Liverpool or Edin- 
burgh. Because Mr. James makes a good deal of her past, 
there must have been some feeling on his part that he was 
bringing together, signijficantly, specimens of different social 
habits; otherwise he surely would not have strained proba- 
bilities as he does in the meetings and acquaintanceships 
that he asks us to accept. An English journahst meets in 
New York a woman whose bosom friend is a Boston woman. 
The Boston woman went to school in Switzerland with the 
EngUsh aunt who controls the destinies of the girl to whom 
previously the English journalist is engaged. 

Why this unnecessary internationalism.'' The contrast 
between Kate Croy's competent wordly intellect and the 
"residuary innocence of spirit" of Milly Theale is simply 
a contrast between two different sorts of girls, who might 
have been born in the same city, any city from Manchester 
to Melbourne. The intellectual girl lets herself go in a kind 
of desperate extravagance, because the innocent girl does 
not quite follow her and so causes her some irritation. 
"She went at them just now, these sources of irritation, 
with an amused energy that it would have been open to 
Milly to regard as cynical and that was nevertheless called 
for — as to this the other was distinct — by the way that 
in certain connections the American mind broke down. 
It seemed at least — the American mind as sitting there 



328 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

thrilled and dazzled in Milly — not to understand English 
society without a separate confrontation with all the cases." 
Well, the intellectual portrait of "our young women" is 
wonderful; you can see and hear those two girls together. 
But it is one girl's mind and another girl's mind, not Amer- 
ican and EngUsh mind as embodied in two specimens. 
In the foregoing passage it is not Mr. James but the English 
girl who imputes Americanism to Milly's mind. But it 
seems to be his idea too, and he notes the same thing else- 
where when he is writing more evidently without the inter- 
vention of an observant dramatis persona. Much of Mr. 
James's internationalism is an invention peculiar to him. 
Almost everything he alleges about a character seems true 
to human nature, but he does not successfully nationalize 
one and another characteristic of the human mind. It may 
be that Daisy Miller was a moral fish out of water and 
tragically perishing (of fever, be it noted, not of innocence 
or moral contradictions), but she was, quite understandably, 
that kind of girl, and not inevitably a compatriot of Mr. 
Howells's "Lydia Blood" or Mr. Dreiser's "Jennie Ger- 
hardt" or Mrs. Wharton's "Lily Bart." 

If Mr. Newman in "The American" had been an English- 
man, the story would have gone just as well. He does not 
do or say or think or possess a single namable thing which 
necessitated his having been born in the United States. 
Whether the Bellegarde family is recognizably and untrans- 
plantably French, only a Frenchman can tell us. But it 
is worth remarking that whenever an EngUsh-writing 
novelist wishes to work into a story some dark crime behind 



HENRY JAMES 329 

marvellous manners and fine breeding, he gets French or 
Italian or Spanish people to play the villain for him. Except 
Meredith, who satirizes the English view of the French in 
"Beauchamp's Career," the moment an English noveUst 
casually informs you that one of his characters had a French 
mother or that his name was Sorrel but his grandfather was 
a wine merchant named Sorolya, you know right away that 
he will commit some crime before the book is done. National 
characteristics are mainly superstitious, held by aliens and 
not recognized by natives or by the thoroughly adopted. 
Newman has not a characteristic which is not American, 
for nothing is unAmerican, not even a preference for cham- 
pagne without ice. What is recorded of him by Mr. James 
as being peculiarly American does not strike at least one 
American as being so. For example, Newman suspects the 
Bellegarde family, and he talks about them to his friend 
Mrs. Tristram. 

"'She is wicked, she is an old sinner.' 

"'WTiat is her crime.''' asked Mrs. Tristram. 

"'I shouldn't wonder if she had murdered some one — 
all from a sense of duty, of course.' 

"'How can you be so dreadful.?' sighed Mrs. Tristram. 

"'I am not dreadful. I am speaking of her favourably. 

"'Pray what will you say when you want to be severe.''' 

" ' I shall keep my severity for some one else — for the 
marquis. There's a man I can't swallow, mLx the drink 
as I will.' 

"'And what has he done?' 

"'I can't quite make out; it is something dreadfully bad, 



330 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

something mean and underhand, and not redeemed by- 
audacity, as his mother's misdemeanours may have been. 
If he has never committed murder, he has at least turned 
his back and looked the other way while some one else was 
committing it.' 

"In spite of the invidious hypothesis, which must be taken 
for nothing more than an example of the capricious play 
of ' American humour,' Newman did his best to maintain 
an easy and friendly style of communication with M. de 
Bellegarde." 

What Newman says will have to be taken as something 
more than an example of "the capricious play of American 
humour,"or as something quite other than American humour. 
A human being from any part of the world might talk 
that way. What Newman says is not distinctly American 
in substance, in tone, in turn of phrase. And there is one 
other thing the matter with it: it is not humorous. It is 
dead in earnest. Newman is seriously troubled, and Mr. 
James so represents him at the moment and in the event. 
But "our author" has "Americanisms" on the brain and 
sees them when they do not exist. 

Mr. James has lost what his brother calls "connection 
with the open air of human nature," human nature in its 
large common aspects. Not that he is untrue to human 
nature. He is a remarkable penetrating student of it within 
a limited range of types and in social surroundings that are 
very narrow though they embrace half the cities of Europe. 
But he has not a broad knowledge of people. His humanity 
is sometimes intense and exquisite; it is not very hospitable. 



HENRY JAMES 331 

He goes deep into some individuals, not deep into society. 
For all his unique originality, he is a conventional man of 
the world, as conventional as Thackeray. He is distinctly 
not a philosopher. As man of letters, professional crafts- 
man, he is a thorough workman; as an interpreter of human 
life in its main issues he is a dilettante, never even betraying 
that he understands or has ever questioned where Newman, 
Verver and Miss Theale got their money and how, or what 
supports the newspaper whose brazen reporter is so annoying, 
what the newspaper means as a social force, beyond the 
fact that a journalist is importunate in the presence of 
gentlemen. 

Mr. James is not a snob, because he has too much candour 
and good sense, but he has never strayed imaginatively 
outside his own comfortable cultivated class. Some of his 
persons are uncultivated and some are impecunious, but they 
are the poor and the vulgar of the upper crust, not the real 
poor, the real common majority. He does not know as 
much as any one of fifteen younger novelists in England and 
America knows about all the principal economic and social 
varieties to be found in a single town. He is almost 
morbid on the subject of vulgarity. It is a fine trait 
to dislike vulgarity, but it is not altogether wholesome 
to feel obhged to name it as vulgar every time one comes 
anywhere near it. Indeed it is a kind of vulgarity to be 
so uneasy about it; it is not polite to flaunt one's wealth, 
and it is not the largest most natural kind of elegance to 
betray a continuous consciousness of inelegance : it is simpler 
to let things and people tell their own story, unlabelled, 



332 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

and to assume that the reader will know that this style 
of speech on that style of housefurnishing is vulgar or is not. 
Mr, James has two technical defects, one of style, the other 
of method. The defect of style is due to his habit of writing 
with his eye and his mind instead of with his ear. His great 
mind saves him perfectly when he is writing in his own per- 
son; but too often when he makes a character speak, he 
equips it with a peculiarly Henry-James sentence, a fault 
not unhke Browning's, but more pardonable in a poet than 
in a writer of realistic fiction. Says Kate Croy: "We 
needn't, I grant you, in that case wait." With all due 
deference to the author of her wonderful being, what she 
would have said is: "I grant you that in that case we 
needn't wait." Folks talk that way in America, and (one 
stands on the testimony of other novelists) in England. 
Of Robert Assingham, a good straightforward military 
man, Mr. James says, "He disengaged, he would be damned 
if he didn't — they were both phrases he repeatedly used — 
his responsibiUty." Now he would be damned, no doubt; 
that sounds right; but fancy his saying, "I disengage my 
responsibility!" To disengage one's responsibility is what 
a very full-worded man of letters does, but not what a blunt 
and none too clever miUtary man does. "'She'll depreciate 
to you,' Mrs. Assingham added 'your property.' " That is, 
in spoken English, "'She'll depreciate your property to you/ 
added Mrs. Assingham." "Run down your property," 
would be still better, more life-hke. Mr. Verver, an Amer- 
ican business man, is the hero of the following hiccough- 
ing row of phrases: "'Well, I mean, too,' he had gone 



HENRY JAMES 333 

on, 'that we haven't, no doubt, enough, the sense of dif- 
ficulty.'" 

The James sentence, as a rule, will be found, upon scrutiny, 
to contain, admirably, each thing in its place, the entire 
idea; and whatever another writer, more naturally following 
the path of least resistance, which, on the whole, is that path 
normally pursued by the human mind, would tag on, as 
who should say, as an afterthought, he cunningly, and true 
to an ideally more perfect intellectual arrangement, inserts, 
or more properly builds in, so that, in fine, to the Enghsh 
language is wonderfully restored, in him, some of the effect, 
so long lost, of the periodic sentence. But people don't 
talk that way, even the rather intellectual and delightfully 
clever human beings that he assembles. 

The other defect, that of method, is the vice of his virtue. 
He is critic of human fife. He devises an interesting situation 
and then stands off and explains it. The good effect of this, 
which no other novehst quite so curiously affords, is a war- 
rant of intellectual integrity, as if he wanted the reader to 
watch the story with him, discover things simultaneously 
with the author. The difficulty is that having assumed that 
he does not know all about it, but is a spectator too, he then, 
without any new action, gesture or speech to furnish new 
knowledge, plunges into the midmost mind of the character 
and tells things that are working there which only a god 
could know. When Daniel Defoe, narrating external events, 
professes ignorance of something, he plays a pretty game 
with the reader's credulity; for the reader immediately 
claps the positive on the negative and concludes that what 



834 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Defoe does tell he does know all about. This device is a 
good one to establish verisimilitude in an autobiographical 
narrative. But it obviously is not successful, applied to a 
novel in which the author deals with psychological processes 
known only to the omniscient creator. " What she was think- 
ing of I am unable to say. I hazard the supposition," etc. 
The reader's inner self retorts, "My dear sir, you made her; 
if you do not know, you ought to, or there is no use pre- 
tending that you knew all you told us a few pages back." 
"We confess," says our author, "to having perhaps read 
into the scene, prematurely, a critical character that took 
longer to develop." That sounds like candour and ought 
to strengthen the illusion that the writer is telling the 
whole truth and nothing but the truth as he knows it. 
But its effect is quite otherwise; it disturbs credulity, ruffles 
illusion, as when the theatre drop with the castle painted 
on it wavers in a gust from the wings. 

Anything is bad art which makes a reader say: "This 
is not so." And Mr. James frequently does things in the 
talk of his characters and in his own comments which spoil 
the show. In "The Turn of the Screw" he takes the 
governess's story out of her lips and retranslates it into 
an unconvincing idiom, so that what ought to be a great 
tragic parable, a ghost story even more terribly significant 
than Ibsen's "Ghosts," misses fire; the more so in that the 
very nature of the story gives hostages to probability at 
the outset. The plain fact is that many of Mr. James's 
stories do not sound true. They are the work of a critic, 
and they are interesting chiefly to those who like to follow 



HENRY JAMES 335 

with their intellects the wonderful process of his intellect. 
This is especially the case with his later books, which have, 
perhaps unfortunately, obscured those that made his repu- 
tation. The first books, "Roderick Hudson," "The Princess 
Casamassima," "The Portrait of a Lady," "The American," 
are straightaway and simple. 

How came it that the critic ran away with the novelist? 
One reason, it is safe to guess, is that he lacks narrative 
material; his mind is better than the intrinsic value of the 
subject he deals with; he says highly intelUgent and wise 
things about relatively unimportant situations. The great 
novehsts, voluminous as they are, make you feel that they 
are telling only part of what they know, that there is a great 
Hfe behind them. Mr. James is like a great scientific mind 
imprisoned with a few bugs. 

They are interesting bugs and he says wonderful things 
about them. So long as the door is shut and one cannot 
hear the clamour of life outside, one is content to study 
them with him, unflaggingly fascinated. The minute, 
intricate fidelity of his observation is such that it taxes the 
full capacity of the reader's attention. He is a chronicler 
of mental processes when there is process, and an analyst 
of stationary mental states. A good deal of the human 
intellect is comparatively static, so that his work is often 
mere exposition, unfolding rather than progressing. It is 
a treat to watch him trace an idea, to follow it as it swims 
up, touched here by a motive, there by a circumstance, until 
it finally takes shape on the lips of a character. Because 
of his large if not predominant interest in the minds of his 



336 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

people, he is called a "psychologist." He is a psychologist 
only so far as he is true to human nature. All true portraits 
of human beings are psychologically true, the story of Joseph 
and his brethren, no less than one of Mr. James's novels. 
In most stories the motives are simplified and the actions 
elaborated. In Mr. James the action is often subordinated 
to the meanings and the motives of it. Nine tenths of 
what can be said about human beings by a sincere man seek- 
ing the truth is plain, self-evident; hterature and life have 
already made it familiar, so that it is instantly recognized 
when it is met again. The other tenth is complex and cannot 
be briefly explained, and it is with this tenth that Mr. James 
is eagerly engaged. Hence to people who do not receive 
a comphcated idea, Mr. James seems obscure. In point 
of fact, he is a paragon of clarity, sharp, precise and accurate 
with the kind of verbal justice which is characteristic of the 
French. He is obscure only with the unavoidable obscurity 
that attends saying a new and difficult thing. It is easier 
to narrate that a man killed his wife or put on his gloves* 
than it is to say just how Maggie Verver met the stronger 
woman who menaced her married fife. Once you get the 
total development of one of his characters, you feel that 
you have passed all round it and proved that it is a real 
entity occupying space; all the details have been touched 
in, so that complete knowledge finally closes round like a 
curve whose free ends meet at last and fulfil in a circle. 

Aside from the analysis and psychology and all that is 
forbiddingly intellectual, some of the dramatic scenes in 
James's novels are remarkable inventions. If the word 



HENRY JAMES 337 

"scene" suggests something too motor and theatrical, then 
say rather, the situations, the human predicaments. To 
tell one of his plots is hopelessly to spoil him, for his reactions 
on the plots are what counts. Yet in order to indicate 
what an original relationship he can devise, let us roughly 
suggest the situation in "The Golden Bowl." Maggie 
Verver is daughter of a rich American art collector. She 
marries an Itahan Prince. Just before the wedding there 
appears on the scene Charlotte Stant, a friend of Maggie's. 
The Prince and Charlotte have been in love but unable to 
marry because they have not money enough. They have 
one hour together, unknown to Maggie, in which they go, 
ostensibly for Charlotte to buy Maggie a wedding present, 
into a curio shop. They see there a golden bowl, which 
Charlotte admires. The Prince knows it is cracked. After 
the wedding of Maggie and the Prince, Mr. Verver, whose 
daughter has been his intimate companion, is lonely. He 
proposes to Charlotte and is accepted only after they have 
telegraphed to Maggie and the Prince for their approval. 
The Prince and Charlotte are thus thrown together, the 
Prince and his wife's stepmother! Maggie has known 
nothing of their past, but she finds it out, partly through 
the golden bowl and the curio dealer, whom she stumbles on. 
That outUne, which is too crude even to be an outline, is 
suflicient to suggest the quadrangular situation, compared to 
which the familiar triangular situation is child's play. The 
working out of the story is, at the lowest possible estimate, a fas- 
cinating game of motives; at the best estimate, the one which 
is worthy of it, it is very noble study of human character. 



338 THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 

In his unemotional way Mr. James is a worshipper of what 
is fine in men and women. He is somewhat timid in handhng 
passion, but he contrives to let you know that it is there, 
off the stage, but a vital part of the piece. He is not a poet, 
and that, rather than any conviction of reaUsm, is probably 
the reason that the decided tendency to the romantic which 
he showed in his youth has not deepened, but has almost 
entirely disappeared. Some of his titles, especially the later 
ones, are as symbolic as Ruskin's, but their symbohsm is 
intellectual, not poetic. They are like all his metaphors, 
of which he is prolific, analogies contrived by the mind, 
not the immediately sensational metaphors of the poet's 
vision. They explain, they elucidate, but they do not 
flash on the ear or the eye; they are the work of a man 
whose miderstanding is great, but whose sense of beauty 
is not wonderful. His is a critical intelligence turned into 
fiction, as some undramatic poets turned to drama in Shake- 
speare's time, because drama was the thing doing. He 
has not much of what may fairly be called the instinctive 
gift of narrative. But his unusual intellect and fine artistic 
conscience have made him an object of intense admiration 
for his fellow-craftsmen. There are better story tellers, 
there are several hving writers with a more natural ear for 
style. There is not one whose mind is more interesting to 
encounter, or who puts more sheer brains into his books. 

BIOGAPHICAL NOTE 

Henry James was bom in New York City, April 15, 1843. 
He is a brother of William James, the philosopher. He was 



HENRY JAMES 839 

educated in Europe and at the Harvard Law School. Since 
1869 he has hved in Paris, London, Italy, and other places 
in Europe. 

His principal works are: A Passionate Pilgrim, 1875; 
Transatlantic Sketches, 1875; Roderick Hudson, 1875; The 
American, 1877; French Poets and Novelists, 1878; The 
Europeans, 1878; Daisy Miller, 1878; An International 
Episode, 1879; Life of Hawthorne, 1879; A Bundle of Letters* 
1879; The Madonna of the Future, 1879; Confidence, 1880; 
Diary of a Man of Fifty, 1880; Washington Square, 1880; 
The Portrait of a Lady, 1881; The Siege of London, 1883; 
Portraits of Places, 1884; Tales of Three Cities, 1884; A 
Little Tour in France, 1884; The Author of Beltraffio, 1885; 
The Bostonians, 1886; The Princess Casamassima, 1886; 
Partial Portraits, 1888; The Aspern Papers, 1888; The 
Reverberator, 1888; A London Life, 1889; The Tragic Muse, 
1890; The Lesson of the Master, 1892; The Real Thing, 
1893; Picture and Text, 1893; The Private Life, 1893; 
Essays in London, 1893; The Wheel of Time, 1893; The Spoils 
of Poynton, 1897; What Maisie Knew, 1897; In the Cage, 
1898; The Two Magics, 1898; The Awkward Age, 1899; 
The Soft Side, 1900; The Sacred Fount, 1901; The Wings 
of the Dove, 1903; The Ambassadors, 1903; The Better 
Sort, 1903; William W. Story, and His Friends 1904; 
The Question of Our Speech and The Lesson of Balzac, 
1905; EngUsh Hours, 1905; The American Scene, 1906; 
Itahan Hours, 1909; Julia Bride, 1909. The Outcry, 1912. 



FINIS 



INDEX 



Addison, Joseph, 28, 157, 158. 291 

Aids to Reflection, Coleridge's, 52 

Al Aaraf, Tamerlane, etc., 142—3 

Alcott, Bronson, 182, note 

Aldrich, T. B., 16, 258, 309 

Alhambra, The, 32 

American, The, 328-30, 335 

American Claimant, The, 257 

American Scene, The, 10, 325 

American Scholar, The, 49, 56 

Annabel Lee, 144 

Annie Kilburn, 288 

Appledore, 193 

April Hopes, 292, 293 

Ariosto, 103 

Aristophanes, 250 

Arnold, Matthew, 64, 76, 156, 

203, 292 
Arte of English Poesie, 218 
Atlantic Monthly, 11, 75, 155, 170, 

278, 294 
Aurora Leigh, 236 
Austen, Jane, 15, 265, 281, 292, 

325 
Autobiographia, Whitman's, 246 
Autobiography, Mark Twain's, 270, 

277 
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 

The, 32, 158-63, 166 

Bach, J. S., 235 

Backward Glance O'er TravelVd 

Roads, A, 218 
Bacon, Francis, 69, 140 
Bagehot, Walter, 71 
Balzac, H. de, 15, 38, 133, 135, 

282, 284, 285, 287 
Baudelaire, P. C, 243 
Beauchamp's Career, 329 
Bells, The, 144 
Ben-Hur, 13-14. 



Bennett, Arnold, 15, 17, 289, 325 

Beowulf, 3 

Bergson, Henri, 303-4 

Bibliolatres, 193 

Bierce, Ambrose, 204 

Biglow Papers, The, 13, 194-9 

Binns, H. B., 247 

Birthmark, The, 94 

Blake, William, 5, 74 

Blithedale Romance, The, 87-91 

Boswell, James, 28, 244 

Bracebridge Hall, 26 

Bradstreet, Anne, vi 

Brook Farm, 87-8 

Brooklyn Eagle, The, 245 

Broomstick Train, The, 167 

Brown, Charles Brockden, vi 

Browne, Thomas, 27 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 128, 

148, 236 
Browning, Robert, 102, 226 
Bryant, W. C, v, \-i, 148, 309 
Bryce, James, 215 
Bucke, R. M., 247 
Bunner, H. C, 16 
Buried Life, The, 203 
Burns, Robert, 132, 221 
Burroughs, John, 211, 247 
By Blue Ontario's Shores, 220 
Byron, Lord, 27, 37, 236 

Cable, G. W., 16 

Cabot, J. E., 76 

Calverley, C. S., 166 

Cape Cod, 180 

Captain, My Captain, 213, 239, 240 

Captain Stormfi eld's Visit to Heaven, 

272 273—4 
Carlyle, Thomas, 10, 29, 52, 53, 

56, 60, 64, 65, 66, 140, 184, 206 
Carpenter, Edward, 211, 247, 302 



341 



342 



INDEX 



Cassandra Southiinck, 118 

Cervantes, 249, 267 

Chambered Nautilus, The, 166 

Changeling, The, 196 

Channing, W. E., 188 

Chapman, George, 320 

Chapman, J. J., 76 

Chaucer, 120 

Chesterton, G. K., 10, 302 

Child, F. J., 203, 204, 279 

Children of Adam, 218, 223 

Chivers, T. H., 131, note 

Chopin, F. F., 319 

Christabel, 86 

City in the Sea, The, 143 

Civil Disobedience, 173, 178, 179 

Clemens, S. L., 248-77, \n, 11, 15, 

39, 41, 44, 141, 290-1, 297, 306, 

307 
Clifford, W. K., 303 
Clough, A. H., 102, note 
Coleridge, S. T., 27, 52, 142, 143, 

148, 160, 190, 312 
Commemoration Ode, 191 
Concord Hymn, 73 
Conduct of Life, The, 55, 61, 65, 

note, 73 
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur s 

Court, A, 250, 263-8 
Conqueror Worm, The, 144 
Conrad, Joseph, 3, 17 
Conservative, The, 49 
Cooper, J. F., 35-44, 148, 264 
Corn, 321 
Cornhill to Cairo, A Journey from, 

270 
Cotton Boll, The, 309 
Courtin, The, 194, 203 
Courtship of Miles Standish, The, 

101 
Crane, Stephen, 16 
Cranford, 292 
Crawford, F. Marion, 93 
Cross of S?iow, The, 106 
Crothers, S. M., 170 
Crystal, The, 321 
Czars Soliloquy, The, 263 

Dante, 105, 118, 211, 213, 220, 281, 
321 



Davidson, Thomas, 299 

Deacon s Masterpiece, The, 167 

Debussy, Claude, 119 

Deerslayer, The, 39 

Defoe, Daniel, 333 

Democratic Vistas, 243 

De Morgan, William, 17 

Dial, The, 15 

Dickens, Charles, 6, 148, 249, 287 

Dirge for One Who Fell in Battle, 309 

Dogs Tale, A, 252, note 

Do7i Quixote, 265 

Dostoievski, F. M., 282, 287 

Dowden, Edward, 141 

Dream Within a Dream, A, 144 

Dreamland, 144 

Dreiser, Theodore, 17, 328 

Edwards, Jonathan, vii, 23, 55 

Eggleston, Edward, 16 

Eldorado, 144 

Elsie Venner, 165 

Emerson, R. W., 45-76, 10, 15, 
32, 40, 116, 157, 160, 161, 163, 
171-2, 173, 183, 187-8, 201, 210, 
236, 278, 297, 302 

English, T. D., 136, note 

English Traits, 75 

Eothen, 270 

Epictetus, 61, 184 

Ethan Brand, 94 

Ethiopia Saluting the Colours, 239-40 

Eureka, 151-2 

Evangeline, 101, 102, note 

Eve of St. Agnes, The, 85 

Evening Song, 313 

Eves Diary, 272-3 

Fable for Critics, A, 8, 189 

Fall of the House of Usher, The, 

86, 146 
Fate, 55, 58, 59 
Feathertop, 94 
Fechner, G. T., 297 
Fichte, J. G., 51, 52, 53, 58, 60 - 
Fielding, Henry, 249, 267, 285 
First Snow-Fall, The, 196 
Fitzgerald, Edward, 236 
Flaubert, Gustave, 282, 284 
Flight of Pony Baker, The, 280 



INDEX 



343 



Follotvivg the Equator, 270 

Fool's Prayer, The, 309 

For Annie, 144 

Forest Trees, The Succession of, 173 

Franklin, B., 23 

Frederic, Harold, 16 

Fredericlxsbiirg, 309 

Freneau, Philip, 309 

Fuller, Margaret, vi 

Galsworthy, John, 17, 289 
Garrison, W. L., 122 
Gautier, Theophile, 135 
Gilbert, W. S., 166 
Gilchrist, Anne, 223-5. 247 
Gilded Age, The, 257 
Gilder, R. W., 309 
Gilman, D. C, 323 
Gloucester Moors, 309 
Goethe, 56, 64, 85, 220 
Golden Bowl, The, 337 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 26, 28 
Graham, G. R., 131, 139 
Graham's Magazine, 138 
Grant, U. S., 14, 276 
Gray, Thomas, 102, 207 
Great Stone Face, The, 94 
Greenslet, Ferris, 209 
Griswold, R. W., 128, 138-42 
Guardian Angel, The, 165 
Gulliver s Travels, 248 

Hale, E. E., l2, 13, 16, 209 
Hardy, Thomas, 85, 274, 284 
Harper s Magazine, 294, 295 
Harris, J. C, 16 
Harrison, J. A., 132, 154 
Harte, F. Bret, v, vii, 6, 16, 191, 

255-6 
Haunted Palace, The, 144 
Hawthorne, Julian, 96 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 77-96, v, 

10, 16, 131, 146, 148, 161, 281, 

291 
HazHtt, William, 27, 69, 160, 186, 

206 
Hearn, Lafcadio, 132 
Hegel, G. W., F., 48, 58, 229, 304 
Helen Keller, Stedman's, 309 
Henley, W. E., 7, 110, 140, 141, 211 



Hennequin, Emile, 154 

Henry, O., 16, 255 

Henty, G. A., 36 

Hewlett, Maurice, 17 

Higginson, T. W., 110, 131, note 

Historic Notes of Life and Letters 

in New England, 45 
Holmes, O. W., 155-70, 26, 72, 173, 

236, 278, 310 
Homer, 321 
Hook, Theodore, 285 
House of the Seven Gables, The, 32, 

80, 86-7 
Hovey, Richard, 309 
How Old Brown Took Harper s 

Ferry, 309 
Howe, E. W., 16 
Howells, W. D., 278-95, v-iii, 11, 

16, 249, 258, 264, 265, 298, 326, 

328 
Huckleberry Finn, 12, 32, 249, 

258-62 
Humble-Bee, The, 73 
Hume, David, 47 
Hunger and Cold, 193 
Huxley, T. H., 303 
Hymns of the Marshes, 312 

Ibsen, Henrik, 236, 324, 334 
Ichabod, 113 
Idealism, 58 
Identify, 309 

In the Churchyard at Cambridge, 107 
Incident in a Railroad Car, An, 190 
Innocents Abroad, The, 251-5, 275 
Ir\dng, Washington, 18-34, 124, 

148, 325 
Is Shakespeare Dead ? 253-4 
Israfel, 143 

James, Henry, 324-39, v, viii, 9, 
16, 79, 80, 81, 96, 149, 209, 282, 
298, 299 

James, William, 296-308, v, vi, 54 

Japp, Alexander, 188 

Jefferies, Richard, 302 

Jefferson, Joseph, 25 

Jefferson, Thomas, 127 

Jeffrey, Francis, 171 

Jewet't, S. O., vii, 16 



344 



INDEX 



Joan of Arc, 140, 248, 249, 269 
Johnson, Samuel, 10, 27, 150, 244 
Jonson, Ben, 243 

Kant, Immanuel, 47, 297 

Keats, John, 5, 27, 102, 207, 236, 

239, 312, 320, 321 
Keller, Helen, 307, note 
Kennedy, J. P., 132 
Kentons, The, 292, 293 
Kipling, Rudyard, 6, 17, 36 
Knickerbockers' History of New 

York, 20, 25 
Kreutzer Sonata, The, 286 

Lady of the Aroostook, The, 291-2 
Lamb, Charles, 27, 69, 73, 125, 

156, 161, 206, 250, 278 
Lang, Andrew, 154 
Lanier, Sidney, 309-23, 5, 236 
Last Fight, The, 309 
Last Leaf, The, 166 
Last of the Mohicans, The, 35 
Lathrop, G. P., 96 
Lazarus, Emma, 309 
Leaves of Grass, 210-47, 309 
Lecture on the Times, 46 
Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The, 

25, 26 
Life and Voyages of Cobimbus, 30-1 
Life of Washington. 29 
Life on the Mississippi, 270-1 
Life Without Principle, 187 
Lincoln, Abraham, 201, 208, 211, 

212, 218 
Locker-Lampson, Frederick, 166 
Longfellow, H. W., 97-110, v, 10, 

191, 201, 236, 310 
Longfellow, Samuel, 110 
Lounsbury, T. R., 39, 40, 44 
Lowell, J. R., 182-209, 10, 15, 76, 

100, 116, 124, 148, 159, 161, 168, 

171, 188, 236, 310 
Lyrical Ballads, 218 

Macaulay, T. B., 148, 171, 206 
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 140 
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 3 
Malory, Thomas, 250, 264 



Man That Corrupted Hadleybvrg, 

The, 272 
Man icithout a Country, The, 12, 13 
Manning, H. E., 140, 141 
Marble Faun, The, 79, 81, 91-4 
Marlowe, Christopher, 131 
Marsh, James, 52 
Mather, Cotton, 23, 85 
Matthews, Brander, 249, 277 
Maud Mailer, 118 
Mazzini, Giuseppi, 207, 212 
Meaning of Truth, The, 303 
Melville, Herman, 16 
Memoirs, Grant's, 276 
Meredith, George, 250, 284, 324, 

329 
Merrick, Leonard, 17 
Milton, John, 13, 27, 83, 102, 104, 

190, 211, 235 
Milton, Longfellow's sonnet, 104 
Mims, Edwin, 323 
Minister's Black Veil, The, 94 
Modern Instance, A, 284-6 
Moliere, 249, 267 
Montaigne, 65, 69 
Moody, D. L., 177 
Moody, W. v., 309 
Moore, George, 17, 282 
Morris William, 213, 321, 329 
Morse, J. T., 156, 170 
My Hunt After the Captain, 162 
My Literary Passions, 289 
My Mark Twain, 111, 278 

Nation, The, 215, 289 

New England Magazine, The, 122 

New England Reformers, 46 

Newman, J. H., 73, 141 

Norris, Frank, 16 

North American Review, The, 200 

Norton, C. E., 100, 203, 209, 298 

O'Connor, W. D., 247 
Ode to the Setting Sun, 315 
Old Ironsides, 165 
Old Testament, 7 

Oliver Goldsmith, Irving's, 28, 29 
On a Bust of Dante, 309 
On a Certain Condescension in 
Foreigners, 206 



INDEX 



345 



Oti a Life Mask of Lincoln, 307 
Optic, Oliver, 36 
Our Old Home, 82 
Over the Teacups, 164 



Palmer, G. H., 299 

Paris, Gaston, 7 

Parkman, Francis, ^di, 31 

Parmenides, 55 

Parsons, T. W., 309 

Pater, W. H., 291 

Pathfinder, The, 39 

Paulding, J.^ K., 24 

Paul Revere's Ride, 101 

Peabody, J. P. (Mrs. Marks), 309, 

322 
Personal Recollections of Joan of 

Arc, 248, 249, 269 
Phelps, W. L., 249, 277 
Phillips, Wendell, 207, 208 
Phillpotts, Eden, 17 
Pickard, S. T., 122 
Pierce, Franklin, 79 
Pilot, The, 35, 41 
Pioneers, The, 35, 43 
Pious Editor's Creed, The, 198 
Plato, 56, 184, 297 
Pluralistic Universe A, 303, 304 
Poe, E. A., 123-54, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 

16, 23, 84, 206, 236, 309, 310, 312 
Poet at the Rreakfast Table, The, 164 
Poet's Tale, The, 103 
Political Essays, 207 
Pope, Alexander, 206, 222 
Portrait of a Lady, 335 
Praed, W. M., 166 
Pragmatism, 303 
Precaution, 35 
Prescott, W. H., 31, 34 
Present Crisis, The, 191 
Prince and the Pauper, The, 262-3 
Princess Casamassima, The, 335 
Professor at the Breakfast Table, 

The, 160, 161, 162, 163-4 
Psalm of Life, A, 101, 103, 104 
Psalm of the West, 321 
Psychology, James's, 302 
Pudd'nhead Wilson, 271 
Pyle, Howard, 42 



Quality of Mercy, The, 292 

Rabelais, 281 
Raleigh, Walter, 180-1 
Raveji, The, 129, 130, 144 
Richardson, C. P., 154 
Riley, J. W., vi, \-ii. 309 
Rip Van Winkle, 25, 20 
Rise of Silas Lapham, The, 292 
Robertson, J. M., 154, 326 
Robinson, E. A., 307 
Robinson, R. E., 16 
Robinson Crusoe, 38, 248 
Roderick Hudson, 335 
Rodin, Auguste, 243 
Rossetti, D. G., 7, 142 
Rossetti, W. M., 223 
Roughing It, i55-7, 275 
Royce, Josiah, 8, 299 
Rubdiydt, 236 

Ruskin, John, 64, 65, 73, 136, note, 
214, 215 

Salmagundi, 24 

Salt, H. S., 188 

Santayana, George, 212, 214, 247, 

299 
Scarlet Letter, The, 32, 78, 81, 84-6 
Schauffler, R. H., 322 
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 296, 297 
Science of English Verse, The, 

317, 318 
Scott, Walter, 27, 28, 36, 37, 135 
Scum o the Earth, 322 
Sea Drift, 213, 218, 237, 242 
Selden, John, 160 
Shakespeare, 102, 118, 221, 235, 

240, 253-4, 313, 321 
Shaw, G B., 5, 17, 249 
She Came and Went, 196 
Shelley, P. B., 27, 28, 79, 102, 118, 

142, 143, 152, 190, 211, 212, 213, 

239, 264, 319 
Sill, E. R., 309 
Simms, W. G., vi 
Sinclair, Mav, 17 
Singing Man, The, 309, 322 
Sketch Book, The, 20, 25 
Skipper Ireson's Ride, 118 
Slave Ships, The, 114 



346 



INDEX 



Slosson, A. T., 16 

Smith, Goldwin, 135 

Snaith, J. C, 17 

Snow-Bound, 119-21 

Socrates, 297, 300 

Song for Occupations, A, 220 

Song of Joys, A, 218 

Sotig of Myself, 218 

Song of the Banner at Daybreak, 240 

Song of the Broad-Axe, 215 

South Wind and the Sun, The, 309 

Southey, Robert, 27 

Specimen Days, 223, 243, 246 

Speeches, Mark Twain's, 278 

Spenser, Edmund, 320 

Spinoza, 58 

Spirits of the Dead, 143 

Spy, The, 35 

Stedman, E. C, 309 

Steele, Richard, 158 

Stevenson, R. L., 42, 69, 84, 125, 

140, 141, 145, 146, 171-2, 188, 

247, 258. 302 
Stowe, H. B., V, 15 
Strauss, Richard, 119 
Success, 60 
Sunrise, 313-5 

Sunthin in the Pastoral Line, 199 
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 70, 186 
Swift, Jonathan, 28, 249, 250 
Swinburne, A. C, 144, 193, 236, 

247, 266, 302, 315, 317 
Symonds, J. A., 247 
Symphony, The, 321 



Tabb, J. B., vi, 309 

Tales of a Traveller, 26 
Tales of a Wayside Inn, 101 
Tales of the Grotesque and the Ara- 
besque, 145 
Talks to Teachers, 300, 307 
Taylor, Bayard, vi, 310, 311 
Tell-Tale Heart, The, 146 
Tennyson, Alfred, 102, 266, 267 
Thackeray, W. M., 166, 302, 331 
Thomas, F. W., 132 
Thompson, Francis. 144, 192, 315, 

316 
Thomson, James, 302 



Thoreau, H. D., 171-88, 11, 15 

157, 205, 214 
Those Extraordinary Tvdns, 271 
Ticknor, George, 109 
Tide Rises, the Tide Falls, The, 107 
Timrod, H. B., 309 
To a Waterfowl, 309 
To Helen, 143 
To One in Paradise, 143 
To Our Mocking Bird, 321 
To the Dead Cardinal, 317 
Tolstoy, L. N., 173-8, 214, 281, 

282, 284, 288, 302 
Tarn Brown, 36 
Tom Sawyer, 258 
Tooker, L. F., 309 
Toussaint L'Ouverture, 114 
Tramp Abroad, A, 270 
Traubel, Horace, 211, 244, 246 
Traveller from Altruria, A, 288 
Treasure Island, 38, 248 
TroUope, Anthony, 12, 135, 325 
Turgenev, I. S., 282 
Turn of the Screw, The, 334 
Turner s Old Temeraire, 192 
Twain, Mark. See Clemens 
Two Years Before the Mast, 38 

Uncle Tarn's Cabin, 12, 16, 32, 259 
Underwood, F. H., 209 

Van Dyke, Henry, 5 

Varieties of Religious Experience, 

The, 302 
Venetian Life, 280 
Venus of the Louvre, 309 
Verlaine, Paul, 131 
Vicar of Wakefield, The, 265 
Villon, Francois, 131 
Vision of Sir Launfal, The, 191 

Wagner, Richard, 212, 214, 235, 

236, 239, 266, 319 
Walden, 172, 182-5, 187 
Wallace, Lew, 13-14 
Walton, Izaak, 28 
Warner, C. D., 34, 257, 258 
Washers of the Shroud, 193 
Watts, Isaac, 117 
Wealth, 66 



889 



W 



INDEX 



347 



Webster, Daniel, 113 

Week on the Concord and Merrimac 

Rivers, A. 17«, 179-82 
Weiss, S. A., 137, 139 
WeUs, H. G., 17, 289, 302, 325 
Wliarton, Edith, viii, 17, 328 
Wheti Lilacs Last in the Dooryard 

Bloom'd, 218, 240 
Whistler, J. M., 136, note 
Whitman, S. H., 139 
Whitman, Walt, 210-47, 7, 8, 11, 

15, 32, 63, 97, 102, 116, 132, 144, 

173, 191, 193, 302, 310, 321 
Whittier, J. G., 111-22, 5, 9, 13, 

15, 191, 236, 278, 310 
Wild Apples, 173 
Wild Honeysuckle, The, 309 
Wilkins, M. E. (Mrs. Freeman), 

vii, viii, 16 



William, Wilson, 125, 146 
Willis, N. P.. vi, 131, 139 
Wind-Clouds and Star-Drifts, 166 
Wings of the Dove, The, 326 
Winthrop, Theodore, 13 
Wister, Owen, 30 
Witch's Daughter, The, 118 
Woodberry, G. E., 76, 96, 126, 142, 

153 
Wordsworth, William, 102, 103, 

104, 161, 186, 211, 213, 221, 240, 

285 
Worship, 59, 68 

Xenophanes, 55 

Yeats, W. B., 142 

Zola, Emile, 287 




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